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1-56076-290-X

Michael Swanwick

Robert Silverberg

George^Zebrowski
Rob Qiyilson

Tim Sullivan
R. GaVcia y Robertson

ycho Caine woke up in a body bag

in an organ salvage clinic...

Things went downhill from there!

DARK eONSPIRACy

Novel.
Available in July.

GDW: 2150. ISBN 1-55878-092-0. $4.95. GDW, P.O. Box 1646, Bloomington, IL 61702-1646

the uttimate hepesy. . .
the tpaqic exile...

Find This Exciting Trilogy Everywhere

f lRStBORD sets a dramatic stage. Upon the
passing of Silvanos, the founder of the
Silvanesti elven nation, his son Sithel as-
sumes leadership of the realms. Years later,
Sithel’s twin sons, Sithas and Kith-Kanan,
emerge as leaders of two opposing factions of
elves. This drama climaxes with the mysterious
death of their father. — — ^

In the kmslayeR
WARS, Kith-Kanan
commits the ultipiate '

heresy — falling in
love with a hu- ’

man. Mean-

while, his ^ V

brother. Si- J ^

thas, declares
war on the

humans. BBUlSm .

Finally the

Kinslayer Wars come to ah end when Kith-
Kanan signs the Swordsheath Scroll. However,
he and his followers are forced into a tragic exile.

Concluding this dramatic trilogy, the
CjUAlineStl chronicles the creation of a new,
magnificent society of elves. There, Kith-
Kanan rises to power and, as the first
^=*==5858-5,. Speaker of the Suns, he claims
^^****®**^ many triumphs. However,
coming full circle, his
life is haunted by
^ trouble between

^ Jt , the-^lven fac-

'■'^g X' „ tions, an un-

faithful wife,

suspicious
behavior of
his son and
successor!

, DRAGONLANCE
is a registered
trademark owned by
TSR, Inc. The
TSR logo is a
trademark owned by
TSR, Inc.
®1991 TSR. Inc. All
Rights Reserved.

iONCC^

■ iSJ^rSomS^olI

,>1bnyAft.C3tRteii

ts.'QiiLQqy

All of the power and glory of the DRAGONLANCE®
saga ccime to life in the exciting Elven Nations Trilogy.
Don’t miss a single novel! They’re on sale at book
stores everywhere.

The Kinslayer Wars
Now Available

Firstborn

Now Available

The Qualinesti
Available in November

THAT ABOUT COVERS IT

4 Kim Mohan

REFLECTIONS

5 Robert Silverberg

FICTION

9 Fantasies by Michael Swanwick and Tim Sullivan
1 9 Plague Ship by R. Garcia y Robertson
33 Logos: My Tale Is Read by Rob Chilson
37 The Number of the Sand by George Zebrowski

43 The Cliometricon by George Zebrowski
46 Fireballing by Gary W. Herring
54 The Glory of War by John Maxstadt

56 In the Lowerarchy of the Underpinning by William John Watkins
75 The Face of the Waters by Robert Silverberg

Volume 66, Number 4
(Whole Number 561)
August 1991

33 75

NONFICTION

7 Letters

60 The Winters of the World by Stephen L. Gillett
63 About the Authors

70 Book Reviews by John Gregory Betancourt, John C. Bunnell,

and Charles Von Rospach

Xenocide by Orson Scott Card

The Magic Wagon by Joe R. Lansdale

Deepwater Dreams by Sydney J. Van Scyoc

Shadow Leader by Tara K. Harper

Nothing Sacred by Elizabeth Ann Scarborough

Sacred Visions edited by Andrew M. Greeley and Michael Cassutt

Orion in the Dying Time by Ben Bova

LOOKING FORWARD

64 The Rowan by Anne McCaffrey
67 Tatham Mound by Piers Anthony

Publisher

Lorraine D. Williams

Editor

Kim Mohan

Assistant Editor
Janis Wells
Editorial Assistant
Lisa Neuberger
Design and Production
John Knecht
Sarah Feggestad
Dee Barnett
Marketing Manager
Robert Choby
Advertising Manager
Roseann Schnering
Circulation Manager
Janet Winters

AMAZING Stories (ISSN 0279-
1 706] is published monthly by
TSR, Inc., P. O. Box I I I (201
Sheridan Springs Road), Lake
Geneva Wl 53 1 47

Subscriptions; The price of
a subscription is $30 for 1 2
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House, Inc.; in Canada by Ran-
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AMAZING is a registered trade-
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Printed in the United States of
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Postmaster: Send address
changes to TSR, Inc., P.O. Box
III, Lake Geneva Wl 53147.

Cover Art by Frank Kelly Freas

8158-08

That About Covers It

Kim Mohan

I like reading manuscripts. In many
ways, it’s the most exciting part of
this job, because I never know what
I’m about to get myself into. I think
that every envelope I open could
contain the best story I’ve ever read,
and it’s that sense of optimistic an-
ticipation that keeps me going. So
what if the story I just finished look-
ing at wasn’t quite good enough?
There’s always a chance that the
next one will be a winner.

So I open that next envelope, and
most of the time the first thing I see
is a cover letter. A simple little note
of introduction, maybe including a
bit of personal information about the
writer. And that’s fine; in our guide-
lines for writers, we encourage peo-
ple to use cover letters because, as it
says there, “we want to get to know
you as more than the name below
the title.”

But the guidelines don’t go into
any detail about how to compose a
cover letter . . . and perhaps they
should — because then maybe we
wouldn’t get letters like this one:

“. . . The story is about hunters be-
ing pitted against each other by a
threatening notice that was posted
throughout the forest on opening
day of hunting season.

“The surprise ending reveals that
the note was written by a bear.”

Well, thanks. Now that you’ve told
me what your story is about — ^up to
and including the surprise ending —
you’ve left me with no reason to

read the thing. So much for opti-
mistic anticipation.

When I read a story, I have to try
to decide if other readers will like it.
If I already know what’s going to
happen before I get past the first
sentence, there’s no way I can pre-
dict whether the idea behind the
story is really intriguing, or if the
surprise ending is really surprising. I
can’t imagine leading off every story
in this magazine with a synopsis that
tells what the story is about and
gives away the ending . . . yet I see
at least a couple of cover letters ev-
ery week that do exactly that.

A close relative of the giveaway
cover letter is the synopsis that also
includes a little bit of hard sell:

"... invariably they fall in love and
the future looks promising for them
both but a simple twist of fate
changes their lives forever and con-
cludes [title of story] in a dramatic
way that will leave you wondering
and wary whenever you see a pit
bull for many days to come.”

Just what I’m looking for: a story in
which something happens “invari-
ably,” and one that will have an ef-
fect on me for “days to come.” Any-
way, I already am wary every time I
see a pit bull, so why should I read
this story? Sorry, no sale.

When a cover letter spoils a story
for me, that usually happens be-
cause the writer is trying too hard.
You don’t have to persuade us to
read your story — we’ll do that even

if it doesn’t have a cover letter. We
want to give every story a fair
chance, but sometimes that’s hard to
do when we know how it’s going to
end even before we start to read.

Is it possible to write a cover let-
ter that describes the story and is
still intriguing? Sure it is. Here’s my
all-time favorite, which accompanied
a story that arrived at this office ex-
actly a year ago:

“[Well-known writer] and I were jok-
ing about all the stories an SF writer
has to write in his career: the deal
with the devil, first contact, Adam
and Eve, time travel. I didn’t know
that I had to write that story, but I
did. Later I found out that he meant
four different stories. Oh well.”

How can anyone not want to read
the story underneath that letter?

If you’re thinking about sending
us a manuscript to consider, that’s
groat. But please do both of us a fa-
vor: Don’t tell us the story before we
have a chance to read it.

When we published “Klepsit” by
John Brunner in the May issue, we
should have mentioned that A Maze
of Stars, the novel from which that
story was taken, would be released
in hardcover by Ballantine in July.
The book is out now, and if you
liked the story we think you’ll also
enjoy the full novel.

Reflections

Robert Silverberg

As if we needed more proof that we
are only at the beginning of our as-
tronomical understanding of the uni-
verse, along comes the Giant Black
Hole of 1991 to give us our latest lit-
tle lesson in humility.

Whether it really is a black hole
of the kind that has been puzzling
and fascinating scientists for the past
two decades is, of course, something
we aren’t yet in a position to say. If
it is, then our present theories about
black holes will have to be drastical-
ly revised. If it isn’t, then a new as-
tronomical category needs to be in-
vented. What we do know about it,
as of mid-1991, is this:

— It’s very large.

— It’s very dark.

— It’s very peculiar.

The object in question is about
300 million light-years from Earth, in
a bright galaxy known as NGC 6240.
That immense distance tells us right
away that we aren’t dealing with
current cosmological events. The
light from NGC 6240 that is reaching
local telescopes these days set out
toward us in the Upper Carbonifer-
ous period of the Paleozoic era, when
amphibious life-forms dominated the
Earth and the first dinosaurs had not
yet evolved. What might be going
on in NGC 6240 at this very moment
is something that won’t make it into
the pages of The Astrophysical Jour-
nal for another couple of geologic
eras.

Be that as it may, the data turning
up just now — and reported in that
journal’s April 1991 issue — indicates

the presence of a dark object of co-
lossal size within NGC 6240. The
discovery was reported by Dr. Joss
Bland-Hawthorn of Rice University,
Dr. Andrew S. Wilson of the Univer-
sity of Maryland, and Dr. R. Brent
Tully of the University of Hawaii.

They detected the enigmatic dark
object with the aid of the 88-inch
Mauna Kea telescope in Hawaii —
not by direct observation, but by
studying disturbances created in its
vicinity. NGC 6240, it turned out, is
actually two rotating disks of matter,
very likely two galaxies that have
begun to intersect. The rotation pat-
tern of one of these galaxies appears
to be normal; but the other one is a
mass of gases whose velocity and
direction can only be understood by
the hypothesis that they are orbiting
some object of unusually great size.
How great? The three astronomers
suggest that the mass of the un-
known object is about 100 billion
times that of the Sun — which is to
say, about the mass of the entire
Milky Way galaxy in which we live.
But the space it takes up is only
about one ten-thousandth the size of
our galaxy.

An object that gives off no light
and has great mass in relation to its
size sounds very much like a black
hole. If it is, though, it’s very much
bigger than any black hole is sup-
posed to be able to get — some 100
times larger than the theoretical up-
per limit of size.

The authority for that statement is
the British cosmologist and mathe-

matician Stephen Hawking, whose
calculations indicate that black
holes, as they grow, surround them-
selves with disks of superheated
matter which radiate energy so in-
tensely that no further incoming
matter can reach the black hole
within. At that point the growth of
the black hole ceases.

But the NGC 6240 object has
reached a size far greater than the
Hawking figures say is possible. The
largest black hole that has been
identified so far, in the Andromeda
galaxy, is at best only one hundred-
millionth the size of the unknown
zone of darkness in NGC 6240.
Which places the newly discovered
object in a class by itself — a very
puzzling class.

One possibility, of course, is that
the supposed limits on the size of
black holes are in fact not valid.
Black holes are such strange entities
that they may be subject to a mathe-
matics all their own. If that’s the
case, though, then much or all of
what is presently believed to be
known about black holes would
seem invalidated by NGC 6240.

Dr. Bland-Hawthorn offers anoth-
er suggestion: that the dark object
isn’t a black hole at all, but a dead
or dormant quasar that has picked
up energy from the galaxies collid-
ing around it and has begun to re-
turn to life. But that’s one of those
explanations that doesn’t really ex-
plain very much, since quasars
themselves (the name is short for
“quasi-stellar radio sources”) are

high on the list of current galactic
mysteries. They are brilliantly lumi-
nous and extremely distant astro-
nomical bodies — billions of light-
years away, apparently — which
radiate light as though they are stars,
but don’t otherwise behave in any
orthodox way. They produce an un-
thinkable amount of energy, billions
or even trillions as much as the Sun,
and, like the NGC 6240 object, they
seem to have enormous mass in re-
lation to their diameter.

The quasars that have been dis-
covered so far — the first of them
was found as recently as 1962 — are
all located in the farthest reaches of
the observable universe. The light
they emit has been journeying to-
ward us for ten or twelve billion
years, like messages from the earli-
est days of Creation. NGC 6240, by
comparison, is practically in our as-
tronomical back yard, just a trifling
few hundred million light-years
away. If the dark object in NGC
6240 is indeed a quasar it is by far
the closest one so far discovered.

Since very little, really, is under-
stood about quasars at the present
time, calling the NGC 6240 object
one is like telling us that it is a mys-
tery wrapped in an enigma. But Dr.
Bland-Hawthorn hopes that if it is in

fact a quasar and not a black hole, it
may help us to understand some as-
pects of the life-cycle of these re-
mote and bewildering light-sources.
“It’s just possible,” he says, “that
quasars don’t actually die, but sim-
ply become dim when they run out
of matter to consume, and rekindle
when new matter comes their way.”
But he goes on to say that it’s just as
likely that the thing in NGC 6240
represents matter in some entirely
unknown form. Black holes and
quasars, after all, are nowhere to be
found in the astronomy textbook I
used in college a generation ago — a
book that now seems as hopelessly
quaint as today’s texts are going to
be in the year 2020.

The scientific excitement over
NGC 6240 is considerable, and this
summer is likely to see a host of
new hypotheses emerge. The first
step is to check for the presence of
gamma rays or X-rays in its vicinity.
These are black-hole indicators: in-
terstellar matter being sucked to-
ward a black hole grows warmer,
and ultimately is heated to a temper-
ature that induces it to emit gamma
rays and X-rays. Telescopes aboard
space satellites and the gamma ray
observatory that was carried into
space by the shuttle Atlantis a cou-

ple of months ago will, it is hoped,
provide information in this area.

Meanwhile all we know is that
there’s something big and dark out
there 300 million light-years away
that is nothing like anything else
that our astronomers have yet dis-
covered. It serves, as I said at the
outset, to remind us of how much
we still have to learn.

And yet — and yet — here we are, a
mammalian life-form of this small
planet of a minor sun on the edge
of one of the myriad galaxies of this
universe. As recently as ten thou-
sand years ago we didn’t even know
how to raise a crop of wheat. Six
thousand years ago everyone on this
planet was illiterate. We didn’t even
catch on to the basic principles of
electricity until a little while ago.

(My grandfather was born into a
world that had neither electric lights
nor telephones nor automobiles.)
And, yes, here we are, aiming our
little metal tubes out toward the
stars and finding strange things out
there, and wondering what they are.
Perhaps what’s really significant here
is not that the universe is still full of
puzzlements like NGC 6240, but that
we’ve reached the point of knowing
that NGC 6240 is there at all.

Reflections

Letters

We asked for it, and we got it — dozens of
cards and letters from people who took
the time to tell us what they thought of the
first issue (or two) of the new-fonnat
AMAZING^ Stories. Here’s all the feed-
back that fits into a couple of pages, ex-
cerpted from some of those letters and ar-
ranged hy category.

We'll use more feedback in upcoming
issues — 50 if you have written us and
your comments don 't appear here, maybe
they’ll show up in another month or two.
And if you haven’t written yet . . . what
are you waiting for?

Cover art

The cover was a great choice. It gives
just the right impression of the 30’s-style
SF (or at least the impression of it, since
I wasn’t there) without being garish.

Craig H. Barrett
Canon City CO

I am delighted and impressed by the
mag. I have always liked Hildebrandt’s
work but there is no story to go with
the art. Or is there? Will someone write
one?

Hannah M.G. Shapero
Falls Church VA

The overall impression I get from your
fiction is that you are working to reach a
break-out audience, one that enjoys good
writing. You appear to be aiming neither
at the adolescent, nor the lowest/widest-
common-denominator genre reader. In
which case, I am confused why you
chose as your first cover one that screams
space-opera sci-fi adolescence.

Bill Glass
Venice CA

With only two [issues] out so far, I don’t
really know what your average cover
will look like, but I would suggest keep-
ing them tasteful. If you’re shooting for

the 12-year-old male readership, the
more lurid the better. But for those of us
who are 30-something, .some SF maga-
zine covers are downright embarrassing.

Pamela Shillinghtirg
Roanoke Rapids NC

guide to selection. I find reviews more
useful than back-cover synopses — ^which
are far from impartial and can be mis-
leading.

Mary Anne Landers
Russellville AR

The cover is too SF-ey. Believe me, the
committed SF enthusiasts are few in num-
ber. You must appeal to the average
reader*' The average reader does not want
to be observed holding such a blatant
cover. It looks too much like a comic
book.

Pieire Mihok
Don Mills, Ontario

I was quite taken aback by the cover of
the first issue. Having never read your
magazine before, I had obtained the im-
pression that I would find the latest in
adult science fiction and fantasy. Imag-
ine my consternation when upon the
cover I find a comely lass tied to a tree,
her more than ample bosom thrust for-
ward, waiting to be ravaged by her (pre-
sumed) dashing rescuer, as grotesque,
bug-like aliens do battle over their lus-
cious prisoner. Much to my relief the old
adage “never judge a book (or magazine)
by its cover” in this case turned out to
be true. I found the stories to be of adult
content and theme.

Douglas G. Matthews
San Diego CA

Book reviews

There is an incredible mountain of stuff
out there and the more help there is in
locating the good stuff, the better. How-
ever. I would like to see you have a fe-
male reviewer mixed in there to have a
better balanced view of what’s good and
what’s not.

Ed Milewski
Midland. Ontario

Novel previews

Another thing I like is the [Looking For-
ward section] from forthcoming books. I
hope they will be a regular feature. Face
it, at four-to-six bucks a pop those of us
not independently wealthy are going to
pick up a lot fewer books on spec. And
C. J. Cherryh has so many different
styles you’re never quite sure which C .J.
Cherryh is writing the latest book.

Eluki bes Shahar
Poughkeepsie NY

The Looking Forward section I could do
without. It reminds me too much of
Reader’s Digest Condensed Books, which
I hate with a passion.

James M. Gunter
Houston TX

I was pleased to see the return of the
Book Reviews section. Please retain this
column. 'With the volume of books on
the street and the limited free time of
this reader, I often miss a few books that
I'd otherwise spot in the review column.

George Ware
Dayton MD

With such a huge volume and wide vari-
ety of sf/f books on the market, a dis-
criminating reader needs some son of

I personally can’t think of anything more
annoying and wasteful than printing ex-
cerpts from about to be published books.
Use the space for another story. Save the
money for another story. Don’t make me
pay twice for the same thing.

Steve Davidson
New Brunswick NJ

Your excerpts are long enough to give a
sense of both plot and style. Ideally,
readers will discover novels that they

Letters

otherwise would not likely sample. If
AMAZING does attract people unfamiliar
with the field, Looking Forward will alert
them to delights we -uh- insiders are al-
ready hip to.

Bill Glass

Fiction comments

I especially liked “Victoria” by Paul Di
Filippo and I’m hoping he’s hard at
work on a sequel. Cowperthwait and
McGroaty make a wonderful pair.

Jeffrey Lyons
Laconia NH

My flat-out favorite story in the issue is
Gary D. Douglass’s “Extraterrestrial Life
on the Mississippi.” Rewriting "Wells’ The
War of the Worlds is a rich sf tradition.
The Mark Twain voice Douglas wonder-
fully recreates for his version makes it a
constant delight to read. Next is “Sunday
Driver, Yeah” by A. J. Austin. Austin’s
obvious American-Graffiti pleasure for
classic cars and for nose-thumbing youth-
ful insouciance create the joy here.

Bill Glass

I did not like “Victoria,” not because it
was weird — I didn’t find it particularly
weird — but because I resented Queen
Victoria being portrayed as she was! (I
loathe rewritten history which lampoons
figures of the past.)

Pierre Mihok

I especially loved “The Last Rothschild”
by Daniel Pearlman. I have been search-
ing for a story dealing with anti-semitism
and racism for a while. Most of the sf/
fantasy I read has lily-white, blonde or
red-headed characters blithely revelling
in their own racial (especially Celtic) su-
periority. We need more of that sensitivi-
ty in the sf world.

LLannah M.G. Shapero

W.E, Scherz is a delight. He probably
wears green tights!

Georgia Mae Lubeck
Bandon OR

As for the stories, my favorite [in the sec-
ond issue] is Sharon N. Farber’s “The
Sixty-Five Million Year Sleep.” It works
as both a tough-guy detective story and
a hilarious parody of the same.

I also enjoyed Timothy Zahn’s “Hit-
men — See Murderers.” The fantasy
concept of finding criminals listed in the
phone book is clever and thought-pro-
voking. The author takes an initially in-
triguing idea, then skillfully maintains
suspense and works in complications.

Mary Anne Landers

The stories seem to am to flowery prose
which. I’m sure, will have every fresh-
man english (sic) teacher in the country
nodding approval. Unfoaunately, hardly
any have any resemblance to science fic-
tion and are not even very good fantasy.
Some come very close to being incom-
prehensible.

Since I only have one college degree
and my IQ barely qualifies me for Men-
sa. I’m afraid you’ve outain me intellec-
tually and so will probably not renew
my subscription when it runs out.

Al Yeager
Portsmouth NH

Other stuff

The illustrations are incredible. The illus-
trations in the old format AMAZING
were, in my opinion, a waste of space
and ink. The illustrations in the new for-
mat AMAZING are eye catching, im-
mensely pleasing works of art.

WP. Cocker
Courtenay, B. C.

I have no problem giving credit where
credit is due. I do have a problem with a
goes-nowhere, unfocused editorial that
takes up more than one page. Pick a
subject, Kim! Maybe Pamela ought to in-
sist you give her a little more of your
time, and that will force you into brevity.

Steve Davidson

The magazine, in its new format, is well
put together, easy to read, and physical-
ly appealing. But, the coated stock you
use to print AMAZING has an unpleas-
ant odor to it. It’s not bad enough to
make me stop reading but it is there and
I do notice it. It may be because I have
an oversensitive nose, or it may be that
the stock really stinks and I’m just get-
ting a good whiff, but it’s there and I
thought you might want to know.

Aaron Goldhlatt
Fort Worth TX

Silverbob’s piece on the history of
AMAZING wasn’t bad at all. However,
he did neglect to mention by name Ted
"White, without whom there would have
been no AMAZING to revive, or even for
TSR to purchase.

He also got his magazine names in-
correct. Amazing's, companion was Fan-
tastic, not Fantastic Adventures.

He also refers to Gernsback as a gad-
geteer; the man was more than that. He
introduced a new battery design, the
first sending/receiving radio kit small
enough and inexpensive enough for
home use, generated the concept of fic-
tion with ‘hard’ scientific content as a

way to introduce science and interest
people in it.

Steve Davidson

Your lay-out scheme of starting stories
on right-hand pages with a column of
text and two columns of art is elegant.

It, and the bar at the top of the page
keyed to the prominent color of the il-
lustration, make it easy to flip quickly to
the start of any story.

Bill Glass

Why is there only one illustration per
story? As it is, there is page after page of
two-column type, unbroken by any
copy, or further illustrations. Why not a
few spot drawings? Why not some break
in these pages of interminable copy?

Clarke Purdy
Long Beach CA

Bring back the small size that fits easily
into a brief case or pocket when travel-
ling. Skip the full-color artwork. Forget
about reader letters. What the hell has
happened to you people?

George Tomczyk
Rochester NY

Since the printing costs are the same,
whether the illustration is large or small,
why are all the illustrations past the lead
story so small? Expensive paper, expen-
sive printing wasted on a series of tiny,
uninviting illustrations. For a few hun-
dred dollars more, they could all have
been full-page size — or larger.

Clarke Purdy

Are we ever going to see sf with aliens,
spaceships, strange worlds (in outer
space, not just the mind) again? As I
read lASFM, F&SF, AMAZING, etc., I be-
gin to wonder. Try though, (if it’s possi-
ble) to publish a couple of hard sf sto-
ries and maybe some wonky, wonderful
space adventures? Please.

Gene KoKayKo
Cambria CA

I know that you have so many manu-
scripts shuttled across your desk that ev-
ery possible facet of literature, including
good, hard science fiction, is included.

Do you think it would be saleable to in-
clude perhaps just one such story, plain-
ly marked as such?

Norman E. Cook
Saint David AZ

Keep printing stories that aren’t just Sci-
Fi, Fantasy or Horror — but which are
also, well. Amazing.

/. Henry Biederman
Ringwood IL

Letters

After the first twenty minutes, Beverly forgot about what
was going on in front of the camera, and the action back-
stage became infinitely more interesting. She found her-
self particularly entranced by the way Gabrielle and Sal
avoided each other. They moved like cats in heat, each
constantly aware of the other’s whereabouts, keeping to
opposite ends of the set when they could, and squeezing
by with elaborate politeness when they could not. Sal
was crammed into a corner by the toilet, and Gabrielle
had positioned herself beside the coffee machine. The
little gofer responded by stretching out his legs to block
.access to the john and raised a comic book to his face.

“Bev, darling, don’t crane around like that,” Calvin
said between takes. “The chair is old. It squeaks and that
annoys me. If you don’t like the way they’re playing your
script, you can always close your eyes.”

“Sorry.”

There was something wonderfully surreal about this
klieg-lit suburban living room burning bright in the heart
of an old cereal factory, and about the way the tech crew
lurked silently about in the shadows. It was the nouvelle
vague version of the Inferno with Calvin — triangular
face pulling down to a scrawny goatee, deep circles em-
phasizing those sad, infinitely cynical eyes — cast as the
Director. Lord Weary himself, Beverly thought. And we
are all his attendant spirits.

They were filming the “I hate men” scene MOS (“What
does that mean?” she’d asked on first seeing the term
scrawled on the shooting script; “Mitout sound,” Calvin
had snapped like a Prussian general, and she still wasn’t
sure), soundtrack to be overdubbed later. So there was
soft background chatter about carburetor troubles and
root canal work among the crew, while Calvin orches-
trated the human interaction from his chair behind the
camera.

Gabrielle wouldn’t join Krystal and Bambi until the
end of the scene, so she had little to do but pursue her
tense little vendetta. Sal had retreated into his stack of
comics, lips moving ever so slightly as he turned the
pages, and she waited for him to look up so that she
could smile dazzlingly at him. Every now and then Sal
forgot himself, and his head would start to rise and turn
toward the coffee pot, like a plant yearning toward the
sun. But he always remembered in time to avert his eyes.
It was excruciating to watch.

Finally, Beverly could take no more. Shoving her clip-
board under her arm, she got up and strode to the cof-
fee, poured a cup and brought it to him. “I didn’t know
whether you wanted sugar or Sweet ’n Low, so I brought
you a couple of each. There isn’t any creamer.”

Sal took the cup, surprised. “Oh, hey,” he said in a
papery voice. “Uh . . . thanks. You’re the writer, aren’t
you?” A silver bracelet dangled from a gentle brown wrist.
A diamond stud graced one ear. He looked ungodly
young, though she knew Calvin was too canny to let a
minor on the set. “So am I. A writer, I mean.” He grinned
nervously, revealing bad gums and missing teeth. “Hey,
maybe you could help me. I’ve got this great movie, it’s
not like, you know, in written form or anything yet. But
it’s got this really neat ...” Smile fading, face tightening,

he stared wonderstruck over Beverly’s shoulder. She
turned to see what he was looking at.

The face of an angel and the calm gray eyes of some-
one who wants to hit you. Jeans faded a robin’s-egg
blue caressing long legs and taut buns. Wide shoulders,
muscular arms, sweet smile. God’s own assassin.

Calvin heard the rustle of surprised reaction and
swiveled in his chair. “Well, look who deigns to finally
show up,” he said. Then, “Oh, shit — cut! Bambi, you’re
supposed to be performing, remember? Is that too com-
plicated for your fluffy little brain?”

“But you said — ”

His face became a perfect mask of suffering. “I will
not be drawn into this argument. Take fifteen, people.
Krystal, you stay here, I need somebody to light. Just lie
there like daddy’s good little poodle, okay?”

“You’re such slime, Calvin,” Krystal said in an elabo-
rately bored voice. The cameraman hovered over her,
taking readings. Maurice was a big, solemn-featured
black man, with the gentle look of a born brawler. Bev-
erly had heard that he used to be a union goon and had
once beaten a policeman unconscious.

“Thank you so very much.” Calvin bowed deeply, the
sad half-circles under his eyes disappearing in shadow,
reappearing again as he lifted his head. “I can’t tell you
how much that means to me, coming from a star of your
stature.”

The newcomer waited calmly, an island of self-posses-
sion. “I came by to pick up my script.”

“Sweet Jesus, but there’s professionalism for you!” Cal-
vin stood, sweeping out a hand. “People, allow me to
introduce the newest addition to our little family, James
Pagano. Mister Pagano is a graduate of SUNY-Bingham-
ton and has appeared in community theatre and sum-
mer stock on Long Island. He has played Shakespeare
and not disgraced himself. He has taken on Ibsen and
won. Now he brings his finely honed artistic sensibilities
to the aid of our production.” He rocked back on his
heels, hands behind his back, smiling. Waiting for a re-
sponse that did not come.

Gabrielle held out a script. “Thanks, Gabby,” James
said carelessly. He rolled the script into a tube, stuck it
in a hip pocket and turned away.

He was amazing. Beverly leaned against Sal; automat-
ically he put an arm around her waist. Together they
watched as the apparition opened the front door and
stood framed in daylight. The door closed, and the stu-
dio was suddenly gloomy and chill.

“He’s beautiful,” Beverly whispered.

“Yeah,” Sal agreed. “But a real bastard. You watch out
for him.”

That afternoon, they shot the introductory dialogue for
the morning’s scene. There was an almost tactile pleas-
ure in watching Maurice move with a dancer’s grace,
swooping down on the pair on the couch for a tricky
traveling shot. But it was still Bambi and Krystal deliver-
ing the lines, and Bambi in particular was so bad that
Beverly had to shut her eyes. She had written the char-
acters as young gods, bold and fearless, without shame

Michael Swanwick and Tim Sullivan

or regrets. In her imagination she could still hear the
words as she’d intended them to be spoken.

Calvin gazed after Beverly with glum satisfaction as
she slipped away. She went down the stairs at the back,
rolling up her leather cap and using it to prevent the fire
doors from clicking locked behind her.

It was cool outside. A recent rain had wet down the
pavement, and stolen its heat. The alley was a patch-
work of red brick and granite block, with incursions of
cement and macadam where it had been torn up for
routine repairs. There were even a few of the original
blue-glazed bricks left, scattered among the dried mud
puddles and fossilized dog droppings. She could smell
rancid cooking oil, discarded from the Thai restaurant’s
back door.

The street couldn’t be seen from here. The alley butt-
ended into a blind wall at one end, and doglegged into
a parking lot at the other, making a kind of small, ugly
haven in the middle of the city. Beverly pulled a crum-
pled pack of Kools from a workshirt pocket, straight-
ened one slightly, lit and inhaled.

She had no right to complain. She’d gone down to a
Times Square grind house and sat through three films the
day Calvin had put the challenge to her, and then thrown
together the first draft of her script over one coffee-fueled
night, more as a joke than anything else. She hadn’t ex-
pected him to buy it. But once he had, she’d worked like
a sonofabitch to make it a good movie, light and humor-
ous where possible, and inventive where not. There were
hierarchies in art, she believed, and even at the bottom
— restroom graffiti, say — it was possible to produce work
that was good of its kind. You could write a compelling,
even enthralling graffito, scatological and witty, something
that would freeze the reader in the moment of reaching
for the toilet paper and imprint itself on the brain forever.
She had busted her hump to write a good piece of fluff.

It hurt to watch them trampling her puff-pastry of a
fantasy with their great, filthy feet.

There was a clip-clop noise, like an approaching po-
lice horse. Beverly automatically glanced toward the park-
ing lot, but the sound was coming from her right, where
three trash cans leaned against featureless brick. She
turned back in time to see the bricks waver and bulge
as a unicorn stepped through the wall.

It appeared calmly, with assurance, the horned head
lifting slightly as it emerged, a fetlock noisily kicking
over a trash can. It stepped into the alley, as big as a
Clydesdale and twice as real. Tin cans and bottles rattled
about its hooves.

She dropped her cigarette.

It turned toward her, dancing sideways, muscles mov-
ing smoothly under piebald hide. Thunder made flesh.

Its horn was a sliver of volcanic glass, a hole into dark-
ness, the anti-moon. When the creature tossed its head,
the air whistled. Beverly shoved herself back against the
building, trying to fade into the wall. She caught a musky
whiff of wilderness, of crushed grass and the rank, heavy
scent of living sinew. The unicorn was so close that she
could have touched its heaving, sweaty flank, had she
dared. Heat radiated from its body.

It turned a wild, pitiless eye on her. The hairs of its
mane crackled with electricity, lifting slightly as if it
were underwater. The tail twitched angrily. The crea-
ture’s beauty was almost a physical blow.

No, she whispered, not aloud. For a perfect crystal
moment, she hung motionless and timeless, suspended
in dread.

The great bearded head swung up, and the creature
snorted: an immense sound, deep and universal as a
lion’s roar. A reverberation passed through her, and her
body shivered in sympathy. The beast bared teeth in a
mouth large enough to bite off her head, if it wished,
and lowered its obsidian horn, as if to impale her. Then,
contemptuously, it turned away, leaped —

— and was gone. The alley was empty again, dirty
and narrow, overseen by bricked-over windows. There
was a distant susurms of traffic, as quiet and unceasing
as ocean surf.

For a time she just stood there. Then she went back
to the set.

Inside, the air felt different: closer, cloying. They were
burning joss sticks for the harem scene. Beverly saw that
Sal was setting up, scattering pillows about the set. Calvin
oversaw him, now and then reaching forward to twitch
one into a better position. “Calvin,” she said, “what would
you do if you saw a unicorn?”

“I’ve seen a unicorn. At the circus. They make ’em
out of goats, saw the horns off when they’re young and
regraft one right here.” He tapped the center of his fore-
head, winked knowingly. “Don’t let the bastards take
you in, kid.”

“No, I mean a real one. Only not like one of those
dewy-eyed, wimpy things they sell pictures of in Wool-
worth’s — a real animal.” Already, it was fading into un-
reality, like a Polaroid left out in the sun. She was sorry
now she’d said anything. She stumbled to a halt. “Big
thing . . . like a. horse.”

“I’d put it in the movie. It’s got to do a better job than
some of the jerks I hire. Hey, Bambi! You’d work with a
horse, wouldn’t you?”

Bambi was wrapped in a chintz housecoat, knee to
chin, cutting her toenails. She was wearing harlequin
glasses now. Without looking up she said, “Not for what
you’re paying me.””

Beverly paid little attention to the exchange. A uni-
corn, she thought. I’ve just seen a unicorn!

Down the road at the Algonquin Diner, the crew had a
regular lunch table where they swapped shop talk and
character assassination over burgers and fries. Beverly
took a stool at the counter, so she could be alone with
her thoughts. But Gabrielle came and sat down beside
her. “Just coffee,” she told the waitress. “And a salad. 1
have to watch my figure.” Then, to Beverly, “Did you
see the way he treated me?”

“Uh ...”

Gabrielle took a cigarette from her disco purse and
jammed it in her mouth. Withdrawing a disposable light-
er, she lit the thing, all in sharp jerky motions. “I mean, I

Fantasies

got him the jot"). He was in the White Horse, down in
the Village, waiting for someone to buy him a drink,
and I saw him and I thought, Jesus, he’s so pretty he’s
just got to be gay. Know what I mean? But I saw him
and it was just like: Wow. Have him washed, stripped
and sent to my tent. So I bought him his drink and ev-
erything, and I listened to his goddamned complaints
about his career, and I told him Calvin had an opening
for the leading man, right? You’d think he’d be grateful.
But I got him back to my place and fixed him a drink,
and then I went into the bathroom to slip in my dia-
phragm, and when I come out he’s gone. The fucker. I
mean, he must’ve known what the score was, but he
just ditched me. And ever since then he’s been giving
me this big-sister routine and everything, you know?”

I don’t want to hear this, Beverly thought miserably.
“You’re talking about James, aren’t you?”

“What’s worse is that everybody knows. That was
right after the cast party for Pretty in Punk, and Joan and
Rick and Sal and I went out bar hopping. So the next
day they all wanted to know how I made out and every-
thing, and I said fine, you know. Just great. But look at
how he treats me, they can see I was lying.” Gabrielle
sucked deep on her cigarette. “You think maybe if I do
a good job with him on camera, he’ll get interested?”
Gabrielle asked. “What do you think? I get this mile-
wide-on just thinking about him.”

Then, mercifully, the waitress came back with Gabri-
elle’s salad, putting an end to her monologue.

Wednesday afternoon, as was traditional, Calvin sent out
for Chinese. When Sal staggered in with three enormous
paper bags, the director accepted the ritual applause, and
then the cast and crew converged on the food. Slightly
bedraggled, Sal emerged from behind a scrim with a
handful of little cardboard boxes, and brought them to
where Beverly sat reading. “This is worshu op, and this
is moo goo gai pan, and this is, uh, I think it’s beef.
Here’s your fork, I forgot to get chopsticks.” He knelt
beside Beverly. “Listen, let me tell you about my movie.”

“If you have a movie idea, the one you ought to be
pitching it to is Calvin.” She quietly set her paperback
face down on the floor. It was a garish collection of
pulp fantasies she’d found in a used bookstore near her
apartment, and she was a little embarrassed to be seen
reading it. She’d bought it for the introductory essay on
unicorns. But for all his baroque elaborations on sleep-
thorns, onagers, rhinoceros horns, narwhals, nuns and
someone named Charles Fort, it was clear that the au-
thor had no personal belief in unicorns, and had no
practical advice to offer her.

“No, I mean a real movie. It’s kind of like Star Wars,
see, only with no machines or stuff. See, there’s this
hole in reality — ”

“Why?”

“Well, because they need it. The people who go
through. They’re trapped in our world, and to them it’s
like Hell, you know? Because they belong on the other
side.”

“Mmmm.”

“So there’s this gateway, see ...” He talked all through
lunch. His plot was naked wish fulfillment, and Beverly
found it a little embarrassing how obviously Sal identi-
fied with the princess. He also felt some ambiguity to-
ward the villain, a large, dark and handsome monster
that Beverly didn’t for an instant believe actually needed
to kidnap the princess. A simple phone call would have
gotten him anywhere he wanted with her. By the time
he said, “What do you think?” Beverly had heard enough.

“Sal . . . you do realize that what you have isn’t a
plot?” He looked at her. “It’s just the machinery for a
plot. You take up all your movie getting your characters
into this magical other land, right? But there’s no story
there — the real story is in what happens when they get
there. How they interact, how this changes them, see?
Everything you’ve described should be boiled down to a
prologue — five minutes at best. The way it is now, noth-
ing actually happens. You’ve got to find the real story.”

He dipped his head, lightly kicked a table leg. “Shit.”
Then, earnestly, “No, there’s a real story there. I mean, it
could be great.”

“Get something down on paper,” Beverly said, “and
I’ll take a look at it.”

The sun bloomed in his homely face. “Hey, really?
You mean — that would be great.”

Joan, the soundperson, took off her earphones and said,
“Calvin, I’ve got extraneous noise on that take.”

“Oh, bloody hell, I didn’t hear anything.”

“Come listen.” Joan held out the earphones, and he
shook his head.

“Let’s reshoot, kiddies! This time, let’s not screw up,
huh?”

Krystal put down a paperback romance. “I don’t see
why you bother, Calvin. Nobody’s going to care if the
production values aren’t MGM-perfect.”

“So far as it goes, that is absolutely tme,” Calvin said
smoothly. “However, reshoot we must. I may be a mere
plumber of the cinema, a simple engineer of human hy-
draulics, but I have my standards yet: The camera must
stay in focus, the cattle are not allowed to mug at the
audience, and the soundtrack must be clean. It’s little
enough to ask, God knows.”

A current of electricity shivered though the air; too
slight to notice if you weren’t waiting for it. Beverly
reared up her head, as if feeling for a scent. Something
Special was nearby. She could feel it. As quietly as she
could, she eased out of her chair.

“And just where do you think you’re going?” Calvin
asked sourly.

“Outside. I . . . uh, really need a cigarette break.”

“Permission denied. If 1 have to sit through this, ev-
eryone does.”

Bambi slumped on stage. “Where’s Sal?” she asked.
“I’ll need a fresh cucumber for this scene.”

At first Beverly didn’t recognize the voice on the phone.

“It’s Sal,” the thin voice said. “Look, I wrote some
stuff down. Could you take a look at it?”

“Well ...”

Michael Swanwick and Tim Sullivan

“Great! I’ll be over in ten minutes.”

“Hey, whoah, wait!” Beverly didn’t want to deal with
this right now. Critiquing Sal’s semiliterate scrawls would
require the utmost diplomacy. “I was planning to hit the
sack early tonight.”

“I won’t take up much of your time, really. I mean, I
got something real important later, only ...” That des-
perate, I’m-already-lost tone of voice heard at three in
the morning over the Suicide Hotline. “Please?”

Trapped. “Okay, Sal. Come on over.”

Five minutes later, Beverly asked, “How’d you get
over here so fast?” as she unlocked the door to let him
in. “I thought you lived in Brooklyn.”

“I do, but I called from a diner on Fifty-Eighth. My
roommate needed some privacy this evening.”

“Well, have a seat. Can I get you a beer?”

“No, I mean, that’s really nice, but you know, no
thanks.” Sal shoved a rolled-up sheaf of yellow paper at
her and perched on the edge of her swaybacked Castro
Convertible. “I took your advice and blew off the begin-
ning. This all takes place in the, you know, other world.”

“This is it, huh?” Beverly smoothed out the paper and
with mounting dread began to read the hand-printed
pages. For the next two hours Sal sat watching her, winc-
ing at her every shift of expression, cringing whenever she
sighed. Gritting her teeth, she did her best to ignore him.

At first Beverly was sure that her worst fears were be-
ing confirmed. The story was crude, an amalgam of cli-
ches generously spiced with grammatical errors and un-
intentionally funny misspellings. And yet . . . There was
something to the manuscript that made such refinements
seem secondary. Sal had somehow invested this claptrap
about interdimensional adventuring with real feeling.
There was so simple a sincerity apparent in every line
that she could not stop reading this garbage. And he re-
ally had, just as he had said, rethought the whole tjiing.
All that plotting in one day! In terms of sheer, raw event,
he’d manufactured more story than Beverly could have
used in a year. All in all, there was something here,
something primitive, something that derived its strength
from its very artlessness. Be damned if she knew what it
was, though.

After the treatment were twenty pages of the “novel-
ization” of the proposed movie. She scanned the first
page — enough to know he’d never beat Joyce Cary at
his own game — and laid the bundle down. “Sal,” she
said, “this is pretty good.”

His face unfolded from anxiety into gratitude, a child’s
robot toy transforming one primary emotion into anoth-
er. “Hey. You really think so, Bev? Really? I mean, like,
you know — really?”

“Well, I wouldn’t mistake it for one of Larry Kasdan’s
scripts, if that’s what you mean. But it shows promise.
There’s actually a story here. I don’t know how to ad-
vise you, though. I mean, I couldn’t write something
like this.” She knew better was why, but why mention
that? “So maybe my advice isn’t what you really need.”

“Wheeow!” Sal flung his arms out and fell flat against
the bed, staring up at her ceiling. “I’m a writer, I’m a
writer, I’m a writer!”

Beverly couldn’t help laughing. “Well, I hate to rain
on your parade, Sal. But you’ll have to learn little things
like grammar and punctuation and format. I’ll lend you
a book to get you started on that technical stuff.” She
snagged her Stixink and White off the shelf. “And buy a
typewriter and learn to use it! Believe it or not, nobody
is going to look at a handwritten manuscript. Nobody!”

“I’m a writer,” Sal said happily, goofily. He glanced
sideways at her alarm clock. “I’m a — oh, shit! I’m late.

My roommate is going to kill me!” He leaped up and ran
for the door, stopped and came back for the book. Im-
pulsively, he kissed her cheek, the lightest of pecks, and
was gone.

There was so much more she should have told him:
That if you want to be a screenwriter, talent isn’t enough.
You have to move to Los Angeles and write script after
script and send them out to the agents and keep on send-
ing them out, knowing that they’ll never be produced,
that they’re just the bait to convince an agent you’re
worth taking on. And that once you had an agent you
could return to writing screenplays that would never be
filmed, in hopes of interesting Someone Somewhere
who had need of a writer for something else entirely.
There was so much he had to know, and it was almost
all of it bad news.

So why did she feel so good?

The next morning, Sal came in to the shoot late, his face
covered with bruises. He moved stiffly, and wouldn’t
look Beverly in the eye.

“Poor sonofabitch,” Calvin said when Sal went off to
unlock the properties closet. “He’s got this thing for
rough trade. Goes out and gets himself fisted by these
apes in prehuman form and cries because they never
call him afterward. Never seems to realize it’s gonna
happen, either. It’s always a surprise for him. One of
them is gonna kill the kid one of these days. He’s just
the victim type, they’re going to eat him up.”

Sal, returning, caught the tail end of this. “It’s not like
that at all,” he muttered. “My roommate and I just had a
little argument.”

“Hey,” Beverly said. “You didn’t get into trouble on my
account, did you? Staying out too late?”

“It wasn’t your fault. He’s an artist, that makes him
very high-strung. I should have been more considerate
of his feelings.”

“Oh, Sal!”

He hung his head. “I guess I just don’t have good
luck with men.”

It wasn’t so much Sal’s face that made Beverly want
to comfort him. The bruises would heal. It was the wound-
ed heart that shone through those big, vulnerable eyes.

“I don’t have very good luck with men myself,” she said
gently.

“Yeah, but at least you’re a writer, you know? You’ve
got something to hold you up when you feel like you’re
drowning.”

“But you’re a writer, too, Sal. You’ve got . . . uh, a re-
ally cosmic way of looking at things.”

“Do you think so? I mean really?” He brightened.

Fantasies

“Yeah. Yeah, I really think so, you know. Yeah.”

“Sal, go dress the set,” Calvin said. And when he was
gone, “Well, Beverly, I’ve underestimated you.” He fa-
vored her with an unclean smile.

“Calvin, just what is the problem with Sal and Gabri-
elle?” She hoped that Gabrielle would leave the kid alone
today.

“Queens and princesses will have their fallings-out, ce
n 'est pas vrai'^ They were bosom buddies until the end
of our last flick. Then Gabrielle called Sal a faggot, and
he called her a neurotic twitch.” Calvin put a finger
alongside his nose. “Many a true word is spoken in jest,
eh?”

His smug cruelty infuriated her. “You really make me
angry, Calvin. All this shit you think is so funny is noth-
ing of the kind. It’s all inutterably sad.”

“The monkey’s kiss, the ape’s embrace.’” Calvin
leered. “That’s Huxley. ‘The lecher’s prurient touch. And
do you like the human race? Oh, no, not much.’” He
put an arm over her shoulder, shook her slightly, in a
comradely fashion. “Bev, my sweet, you’re going to have
to rewrite the script. I need pages thirty-nine through
forty-eight by tomorrow, if you can manage. They don’t
have to be any good.”

She raised her clipboard defensively, flipping to the
pages in question. “What’s the matter with them? That’s
some of my funniest stuff.”

“I know, and I’m sorry, but look, you can see for
yourself that Bambi can’t act. She can’t even say ‘good
morning’ convincingly. So you’re going to have to re-
write it without her having to say anything clever, okay?
Just like yes-and-no sort of stuff. Maybe something com-
plicated like, ‘Ooh, that sounds like fun,’ or something.
Don’t overdo it, though.”

“But—”

“I know what you’re going to say.” He looked pained.
“You think I don’t know? I used to be just like you, Bev-
erly. I was young and ambitious, and I certainly wasn’t
going to spend the rest of my life doing this. It was just
a way of getting a foot in the door. I was going to make
real movies, Hollywood movies, it was only a matter of
time. I was going to be an auteur. Everybody in this
business is like that, you know. We’re all failures of one
kind or another. Maurice is a failed dancer, Joan’s a
failed singer, even Gabrielle was going to be a real ac-
tress when she started out. But we all needed the mon-
ey, and the money was easy. So we all stayed for one
more day. And another. And then another.” He was
hugging her, in that disgustingly sincere way she hated.
She could smell his breath, a suggestion of rotting meat
in it; perhaps there was something caught in his teeth.
He was repulsive, and at the same time plausibly, slyly
persuasive. He was comfortable with a cynicism so vast
it made her feel like a child before it.

“Tell you what, though, it’s not a bad life, really, once
you admit that you’ve failed. The money is good, it’s
steady, and, admit it, the work is easy. All you have to
do is accept what deep in your heart you already know.
You’re never going to write anything that’ll last, because
you’re a failure.”

“I’m not a failure!” She believed that, she really did.
But it was harder to believe than it used to be.

“We’re all failures.”

“How do you explain James, then?”

Calvin missed a beat for the first time in the conversa-
tion, and then said with scorn, “James is an asshole.”

But she had him, she could tell by the annoyance he
could not keep off his face. “I’ll do your rewrite, but I’ll
make it good. You’ll see.”

“Sure I will, kid.”

“ — in total awe of the man, and I was overacting dread-
fully. Finally Burton took me aside and told me a story
about when he was just starting out, when he affected a
style with the most extravagant gestures, which he could
not be talked out of, until the day he was appearing in
Henry V and delivering these wonderful lines; ‘Once
more unto the breach, dear friends, once more; Or close
up the wall with our English dead!’ Well, you know
how it goes. And at the climax of the speech, he thrust
out his hand to Gielgud, and Gielgud put a roll in it!”

The Round Table cracked up with laughter. But there
were undercurrents in the laughter, and Beverly unobtm-
sively looked at all the cast members present, trying to
break it down. There were some who hung eagerly on
James’s every word, and others who looked away, would
not meet his pale blue eyes, and left a limp, guilty fringe
about their laughter. By his very presence James awak-
ened a hunger in them all that most thought they’d sup-
pressed.

Gabrielle sat at James’s left, basking in his reflected
glory, pathetically confident that his mere presence
proved he was hers. She slid a cigarette from her purse,
held it to her lips and turned his way: “Light?”

He ignored her. After a wait extended the merest in-
stant too long for anyone to pretend they hadn’t noticed,
she reached down to scrabble out her lighter.

“Hey,” Sal said. “That wasn’t very nice.”

Dead silence. James turned slowly his way. Those fine
features skewed with perfect weighted irony. “What are
you,” he asked slowly, “the good etiquette fairy?”

Laughter gushed over Sal’s reddened face. The tim-
ing, the delivery — James had real comic talent. So far as
Beverly could tell, she was the only one who didn’t
laugh at him. Even Gabrielle laughed.

From then on, James showed up for lunch every day,
and presided over the table. Since Calvin spent his lunch
hours scanning the mshes, it gave the days a schizophren-
ic feel as they vacillated between the two poles of per-
sonality. And every day Gabrielle fell behind to pick up
James’s check.

There was a good show on the tube, so Beverly didn’t
get started on the revisions until nine o’clock. It was
midnight before she was done, and then she felt weary
and beat and ready to sleep. But she scrolled another
sheet of paper into the old typewriter. “Okay, this is for
Art,” she muttered, and typed midway down the page:

“The Dwarf’

This was one of a series of vignettes she planned to

Michael Swanwick and Tim Sullivan

call The Sleep of Reason, after Goya’s etching, which she
envisioned as a fractally linked progression of grotesques
and dark visions. She began by describing an early me-
dieval family, their hopes and situation, and how on the
birth of their third son they placed the child in a jug.
There was a market for court freaks, and on his full
growth the jug would be broken and the artificially mal-
formed child sold for the amusement of the nobility.

This was a conceit with potential for ironic resonance
with contemporary society.

The first three pages went well, cold and spare as
post-modern Poe. But then at Eudoric’s twelfth year, as
he stared from the corner at the misshapen lives of his
family, hopelessly lusting for his near-idiot older sister,
the prose went out of control. Eudoric’s agonized self-
hatred eaipted in a geyser of adjectives, syntactically
tangled and clotted subordinate clauses snarling in mid-
air, destroying the fabric of the story, suggesting without
ever arriving at meaning, until out of its dark swirling
center there emerged a leather-winged monster. It was
real. It might be the product of the child’s madness, but
it had actual tangible existence, and it roared up the
chimney and out into the village night to feed.

The New Yorker would never buy this. It was too ugly.
But then again, hadn’t beauty been discredited as mid-
dle-class sentimentality? There was something here. She
determined to follow it through to the end.

She got another thousand words down before she
could no longer see the page, and staggered to bed.

James leafed through the revised script. It was his first
day up, and everyone was curious to see how he would
perform. “This isn’t half bad,” he said. “I think the writer
should take a bow.” Beverly stood, curtsied lightly. “It’s
a rewrite of Mandragora, right? Machiavelli. Very clever.”

“Machiavelli for morons, yeah,” Beverly said. Even
Calvin had missed that. Beverly allowed herself one look
at him, but he was facing away from her.

James glanced up toward the gaffer at the lightboard.
“Make me look good, okay?” He grinned and smoothed
back his hair. Then he strode onto the set, doffing his ,
gown and tossing it unerringly behind him. Leaving
Beverly feeling as stricken as a Mexican peasant vouch-
safed an apparition of the Virgin.

James was every bit as good as expected, and some-
how that made it all the worse, because he was playing
opposite KTystal, who could almost act. In his presence
she was just awful; the contrast killed her. And just as it
seemed the scene could get no worse, Bambi made her
entrance.

They reshot the same scene time after time. Only
James was any good. He walked through his lines, with
the cold disdain of an actor who can perform in his
sleep, weighted down by amateurs. It wasn’t that he de-
spised the others. He simply considered them beneath
his notice.

At lunch, James once again dominated the Round Table.
Beverly had found another paperback about unicorns,
and again she sat at the counter to get away from the

others. Gabrielle sat beside her, went through the cigar-
ette lighting ritual, stared ahead into space.

Then she said, “I was kidnapped by a UFO.”

“’What?”

“When I was a teenager. I was having these troubles
at home and with school and everything. Then my stom-
ach swelled up and I thought, well . . . But then after I’d
been yanked from school it went down again, and they
sent me to a shrink who said it was a hysterical preg-
nancy, you know? It never really happened. Only I
knew it happened because you should have seen my
stomach. Einally my parents decided to try a hypnotist.
This guy it turns out is really famous and handles the
big UFO cases and everything, only I didn’t know that at
the time, and he put me under and questioned me and
all these repressed memories came out.”

“Repressed memories?”

“Yeah, see, about a year before I was in bed and sud-
denly I was awake, and the room was filled with light
and everything, and there was this enormous, pervasive
noise everywhere, like construction equipment or some-
thing. Then I was lifted up in the air, and like right
through the ceiling, okay? And into this silvery whirling
saucer. There was this alien there, see, and he was green
and tall and skinny and everything, and he had this bulg-
ing forehead. Big eyes, no nose. We had a romantic in-
terlude.” Looking soulful, she took a drag off her cigar-
ette. “Then, when I’d made a baby, he came back and
took it away.”

“You, uh, remember all this?” Beverly asked carefully.

“Oh yeah, now that I’ve been hypnotized I remember
it all. See, they’re dying out, and they need our genetic
material, which is more vigorous than theirs, in order to
survive. But at the same time they’re a very ethical race
and they don’t want their kids raised on Earth, ’cause it’s
violent and polluted and everything. So they had to take
the baby away. They explained it to me, and then made
me forget so I wouldn’t be upset.”

“So you’ve been in a saucer twice?”

“Three times. They came back later, so I could meet
my daughter.” She gazed upward raptly, blindly. “She’s
out there now, my baby girl is. In a better world.”

Can I die now? Beverly thought. And when I do, will
they bury me on Planet Earth? “Holy cow,” she said
aloud. “Look at the time. If we don’t get back to the fac-
tory soon, Calvin will kill us.”

The rushes were disappointing. Worse, Calvin was per-
fectly satisfied with them. “Look,” Beverly argued, “can’t
you just shift Bambi? I mean, let her play Lady Di and
give the kid sister role to Dominique. Then — ”

“My dear Willa Cather,” Calvin said. “We’re not film-
ing Heaven’s Gate here. We’ve got a severely limited
budget, and we cannot reshoot every goddamn scene.
You don’t know what I have to go through to finance
these things. You don’t know the kind of hoods I have
to deal with. If we go over budget, they’re likely to
break both my knees.”

“I know, I — ” A shiver went through the air, an elec-
tric thrill of dread and desire. “But I . . .” She couldn’t

Fantasies

think. Her body tensed; her skin felt hot. “I’m not . . .”
Beverly put down her papers. “’Sense me.” She ran for
the fire exit.

“Hey!” someone called after her.

It was there, as she emerged into the light. As if wait-
ing for her. She trembled in fear, but managed to whis-
per, “Here, boy . .

The beast turned to stare scornfully over its shoulder
at her, and she cringed away. She wanted to be brave.
She wanted to let it do whatever it wanted with her. But
within the unflinching honesty of those eyes she felt her-
•self revealed as weak and hesitant. And then it was gone.

She carried the bag of groceries to her fifth-floor walk-
up efficiency. Tossing her cap in a corner, she took out
a carton of milk, and drank from it as she sotted throtigh
her mail. There was a letter from her father. She read it
through twice, and then folded it in half and stuck it in
her pocket, feeling sick and angry.

“"Well, fuck you. Daddy,” she muttered, and began to
cry. “Fuck you too.” When she felt better, she went out
for a walk.

It was cold on the sidewalk; the city chilled down
quickly after sunset. She walked hunched forward slight-
ly, hands jammed in her windbreaker pockets. The odor
of garbage wafted through the evening shadows. Dark-
ness was brought on early by the endless rows of build-
ings. Up here in Washington Heights they weren’t any-
where near so high as in downtown Manhattan, but
they were tall enough: twenty, thirty floors of windows,
a mosaic of cool, orange lights. She shivered. The build-
ings seemed to lean over her, window upon window
upon window.

She looked up and thought: So much pain. If you
could shake the pain and misery from those buildings it
would pour out and drown you. All that thick liquid dark-
ness of suffering and betrayal streaming down the streets
of New York. How much misery was she looking at, she
wondered, how much pain? It all seemed to have a weight
and presence of its own, distorting the city about it.

She imagined all this pain forming magnetic fields
that warped out from individuals, overlapping, merging
into vast, twisted wings over the island. Or like gravita-
tional fields transforming space, each small human trag-
edy adding to the weight of unhappiness pressing down
on this small granite island, making the land buckle un-
der its presence. How much more would it take until it
collapsed in upon itself, like a black hole in the depths
of space? How' much more before you punched a pin-
prick hole in reality?

For no reason she thought of the unicorn, for the first
time since receiving the letter. It seemed to waver in the
air before her eyes, so pure and innocent in its wild, sav-
age way. And perfectly irrelevant, a creature that had
nothing to do with life as it actually was.

“Take me away,” she whispered to the cold. “Take
me out of this shitty world.”

But she didn’t believe for an instant that it would
happen.

* * *

Beverly was sitting by the coffee machine the next morn-
ing, writing on a yellow legal pad, when she realized
that James was making trouble. She was still working on
the dwarf story. The problem was that after all her pro-
tagonist had suffered in impotent rage — he couldn’t
even get his hands out of the jug — the discovery of a
way for him to take action overwhelmed everything. He
just kept creating monsters, and when she tried explain-
ing that he didn’t really want to, the monsters came out
anyway, all the repressed urges of her character’s sub-
conscious. They were unstoppable. Then she looked up,
and saw what was happening on camera.

James had subtly altered his character, from a stan-
dard handsome stud to an autocratic, weary figure who
was able to convince the other characters that black was
white and his own perversions amusing. As he tugged
knowingly at an invisible goatee, Beverly realized whom
he was caricaturing. “Oh, shit,” she murmured to herself.
, “Derek, darling,” Bambi said. “Do you think we
should do it?”

James smiled sneeringly. Eyes rolled up slightly under
half-lowered lids. The smallest of suave shrugs. “"Why
not?”

It was so savage, once she saw it, that she couldn’t
imagine whether Calvin knew or not. Did he possess
the insight to see himself as others saw him? Beverly
guessed that he was too clever by half to miss it. Before
the scene was finished, he yelled, “Cut.”

The actors froze on the set, turned to the director’s
chair.

“This simply is not working, James,” he said. “It isn’t
that I don’t appreciate what you’re doing. Believe me,
no one — no one — could empathize with your perfor-
mance more perfectly than do I. Your brilliance is truly
awe-inspiring. Unfortunately, it doesn’t fit with the script
as written.”

“Don’t be an ass,” James snapped. “Of course it
does.”

“Oh, didn’t I tell you?” Calvin smiled. “Beverly, take
notes: James’s character is now a deaf mute. That
changes the character considerably, but not the plot all
that much. You see? It adds a touch of the mythic to the
performance. Sort of like Clint Eastwood, if Monsieur
Eastwood were to condescend to work down here
among the peons.”

Everyone gaped. “You can’t do that!” Beverly cried.
“James is the only one here who can act\ You just can’t
do it!”

“I most certainly can do whatever I want. Who’s on
lights? Rick — hit me with a blue spot.” In the sudden
holy light, Calvin looked dreadful and pale as a corpse.
He crossed his legs and spread his arms. “Let me tell
you a little fable.

“In the beginning were the Words. They were collect-
ed into a single volume which chronicled the history of
the universe and prescribed a simple moral code for its
inhabitants. The Author didn’t expect much from His cre-
ations. He laid down for them a stern gospel of strength,
which granted virtue to the victor, and kept the defeated
in line with a whip. An animal could follow it.

Michael Swanwick and Tim Sullivan

“But for some reason the most dearly beloved of His
inventions, a group of tailless apes, could not. The Au-
thor was puzzled. He sent His only begotten Son to visit
the face of the Earth and find out why.”

“Is this sacrilegious?” Bambi asked in an irate, piping
voice. “I’m a Christian and I won’t listen to any ...”

“Hush, my evangelical little cow, you’re stepping on
my lines.” Calvin smiled. “Here comes the ugly part. The
people used His Son abominably. They beat him and
scourged him and, in a final piece of typically charming
primate ingenuity, drove long nails through his hands
and feet and tortured him to death.

“You can imagine how angry the Author was, what
horrors of fiery retribution and destruction He consid-
ered. For an instant all of creation trembled on the brink
of oblivion. But He was a writer, remember, and the end
required a vengeance involving words rather than direct
action. So He updated His oeuvre with a satire of the
whole sordid affair, and — oh, the cunning of it! — includ-
ed within this satire a set of guidelines for leading a good
and moral life. Which He knew His apes could never
follow. But in their finest moments, they could come
close enough to His ideal. . . . Close enough to drive
themselves mad with guilt.

“And on the Last Day the Author will judge the living
and the dead, and they will one and all be damned for-
ever to return to the Hell they have made of this Earth.”
He paused dramatically. “So let’s not hear any of this
shit about cheapening the script. The script is beautiful
and perfect as it is, true — but you’d better by God hope
that in the final analysis the Author is not a true artist,
but rather a hack, like me. Someone who’s willing to
sacrifice the elegant logic of tragedy for the sake of a
cheap and undeserved happy ending. Kill the spot.”

The light went out, plunging the world into darkness.

In the silence, Calvin lifted a clipboard. “Let me see
that shooting schedule. Umm, yes. It’ll be a little tight,
but we can reshoot all of James’s lines single-take silent
and still have a wrap in time.” Beverly stood aghast.

“I won’t do it,” James said, as if speaking for her. “No
way.”

“We’ve all got to root in the dirt,” Calvin said. “That’s
what it is to be human.” To Beverly, “Write it up tonight.”

“I won’t do it!” James insisted.

“You haven’t been paid yet. If you want to get paid,
you’ll do it; if not, well, there’s the door.”

The evening was quiet, all of New York reduced to back-
ground noise and edited to silence by its sheer familiari-
ty. The stairwell was redolent with the smell of boiled
cabbage. Footsteps echoing upward, Beverly climbed
home. She was not expecting to find a man in her door-
way. She came up from the landing, keys extended, and
then shrieked as he straightened from the shadows and
came at her. “Oh!” she cried, and then, “You startled me.”

Casually, James raised her hand and kissed a knuckle.
Then he looked at her with those killer eyes, smiled a
carefully rehearsed smile, and raised a questioning brow.
“Aren’t you going to invite me in?”

And even though she knew better, even though she

knew exactly what the score was, she found herself say-
ing, “Yes.”

When they got inside, she poured two glasses of wine
and they made small talk. He kissed her once, almost
chastely, and she kissed him back with passion. It had
been a long time.

James was self-conscious and formal at first, as if he
were still in front of the cameras. But then she pulled
him down atop her, whispered, “Stop screwing around,”
and wrapped her legs tight about his waist. He was bet-
ter after that.

She was just getting involved when he took her wrists
in one hand, and held them down on the pillow over her
head. He cocked his other hand and slapped the side of
one breast, hard. His dark, perfect smile gleamed in the
night. The pain and indignity of it shocked her into lu-
cidity. “Hey!” she cried. “I don’t do any of that shit!”

“You should try it, just once,” he urged her. “You’ll
like it.”

She wrenched her hands free. “Not like that.” She
moved his hands where she wanted them. “Like this. And
gently, understand? Gently.” She wasn’t about to play his
games. You don’t give in to something like that, or you
end up like Sal, so inured to mistreatment you begin to
imagine you like it.

Immediately after he was done, James rolled over,
looked her in the eyes, and said, “Listen, I’ve been think-
ing about the movie.”

She rewrote the script for him, hammering away at that
old typewriter on the kitchen table, while James sat in
the easy chair, reading a paperback. Several times, she
thought she was done, but he frowned and made further
suggestions, sending her back to her dilapidated ma-
chine. 'When at last she was finished, it was two o’clock
in the morning. James read it through carefully. “Yeah,”
he said. “That’s a lot better. Mind if I use your phone?”

After he left, she lay awake for a long time thinking
first about the unicorn, and then about her father. The
cold cracked plaster, the browning formica with encrust-
ed roaches where it met the wall, had never seemed so
solid before, so inescapable. She saw them as a prisoner
might see the walls of her cell for the first time.

She showed up the next morning laden down with the
stack of script inserts from Jiffy-Print. She handed one to
Calvin and he flipped through it. His face changed col-
or. He looked up at her in mute outrage, turned and
stalked away to get a glass of water. It took him a min-
ute to regain his composure. When he came back, he
took her hands in his. She stared down at them, unwill-
ing to face his eyes. There were tiny black curly hairs on
the backs of his fingers.

“Calvin, I — ”

“Shut up!” he said fiercely. Then, rapidly, “My next
movie is going to be called The Girl in the Glass Box.
That’s only the working title, of course. It’ll be changed
to something more commercial by the distributors. But
that should be enough to give you a start on the script.
We can start filming in three weeks.”

Fantasies

She stared at him, uncomprehendingly. “You want
me to write your next script? After what I’ve just done?”

“I foresee a long working relationship here,” Calvin
said. “I can see you writing my next ten movies for me.
My next thirty. My next two hundred.” He grinned, and
it was painful to see how angrily he did so. “If not for
me, then for somebody just like me. Because you’ve fi-
nally admitted just what you are.”

“No,” she said in a small voice.

“Oh, yes,” he hissed through gritted teeth. “Oh, yes,
you have!”

But what was done was done. It was either shoot by
James’s script, or hold over shooting another day.

Her dwarf wouldn’t respond. She’d brought him to the
climax and now he simply stared blindly ahead of him,
driven catatonic by what he’d done. But that left her sto-
ry in the lurch, with no sense of closure, no feeling of
having arrived somewhere.

Beverly had just ripped another page from the legal
pad, crumpled it into a ball and thrown it away when
Gabrielle screamed like a parrot. Beverly looked up
blankly. Gabrielle was staring at her, red-nailed index
finger pointing at her in recrimination. At her side, James
smiled warmly. “You pig!” Gabrielle screamed. “You
whore, you slut! You bed-hopping, man-stealing bitch!”
Tears were running down her cheeks, smearing her mas-
cara. Her hands fell heavily to her sides, and she miser-
ably said, “I thought you were my friend.”

She turned and noisily fled to the far side of the sound
stage to cry. Rick, Joan, and Bambi bobbed along in her
wake, with handkerchiefs and sympathy extended.

Leaving Beverly standing alone, the villainess of this
trashy little set-piece. The Other Woman. The seduc-
tress. The vamp. James was grinning openly at her. There
was frank interest in his eyes, a look Beverly knew well,
for she had caught it on her own face on occasion. He
was watching, curious to see how faces looked in crisis,
making mental notes. This, even more than his natural
malice, was why he had told Gabrielle about last night.
Just to see how she would react. Beverly flushed, and
turned away.

Sal walked up, munching on an apple. “Hey, what’s
wrong with Gabby?”

Beverly was glad to have a friend at a time like this.
“Oh, God, it’s all such a ridiculous mess,” Beverly said.
“Gabrielle’s having hysterical fits because James told her
that we went to bed together last night and — ” She
stopped.

Sal was staring at her with large, betrayed eyes.

Oh shit, she thought. His roommate. The bastard who
likes to hit people during sex. So pretty he’s got to be
gay. He’s an artist, high-strung. James. Sal and James.
How could she have been so dense?

“Look ...” she began, but he turned away from her,
eyes filling with tears, and fled into the shadows at the
rear of the room. “Sal!”

The director’s office door slammed open. “’What the
hell is going on out here?” Calvin roared, and from the
darkness Sal screamed back: “I’m going to kill myself!”

Calvin rolled his eyes and said, “Now, Sal ...”

Sal’s feet clattered on the iron stairway. Calvin hurried
after. The rest of the cast and crew, Beverly included,
followed.

Sal spun to rest at the bottom landing, slumped against
the heavy metal doors. “Don’t come near me!” he sobbed,
clutching at the pushbar, and Beverly had to suppress a
giggle, for it was the stuff of farce, this confrontation.
Then she felt a familiar tingling at the back of her skull,
a slight lifting of the tiny hairs on the nape of her neck,
a nervous wildness that suddenly surged through her
blood. The unicorn!

The air was full of potential, as if a thunderstorm hov-
ered just outside. Open the door, she thought. Open the
door and let it afl flood in.

■With a cry of despair. Sal put his weight on the push-
bar and threw open the doors.

The unicorn was there, strong-scented and wild. There
were flecks of foam on its lips, and broken red blood
vessels in its eyes. Its bestial odor was sensual, over-
powering. The cast poured out into the alley, and those
in front cried out in horror and shrank back, while the
press of those behind pushed them farther out. Joan
stumbled and sprawled face down onto the macadam.
The sudden motion must have startled the beast, for it
reared up, hooves of black diamond scoring the air, and
screamed. It was the sound of fury and primal madness
unleashed, and it froze them all with terror as the crea-
ture crashed down to the cobbles.

All but one. Still weeping, Sal ran and leaped for the
unicorn’s back. He climbed up, threw back his head and
made the most extraordinary noise Beverly had ever
heard in her life. It was somewhere between a strangled
laugh and a scream of despair. But at its peak Sal’s eyes
opened wide, as if he were staring into a place of unim-
aginable beauty, and he was shocked into silence.

The beast reared back and pawed the air, nostrils flar-
ing. For an instant, worlds overlapped, and sweet forest
air gushed into the alley. Then the unicorn leaped up-
ward into a land that was green and pure and clean, un-
tainted by machinery or greed or human want, and was
gone.

Calvin and Maurice helped raise Joan slowly to her
feet. James backed into the doorway and vanished as
surely and finally as had Sal. The rest of the cast and
crew stood there for a long time, and then broke up. No-
body spoke. Nobody said a word. It was as if they knew
that the slightest comment would cause all memory of
the beast to flee, just as the unicorn itself had fled. Final-
ly, Beverly realized that whatever had brought the uni-
corn into her world in the first place, it was never com-
ing back.

She went back into the cereal factory, then out the
front door to the street. She caught a cab back to her
apartment building, climbed the stairs, unlocked the
door. In the kitchen, she sat down and tossed her cap
into the corner.

“Well,” she said to herself, “I’m home.” >-

Michael Swanwick and Tim Sullivan

Plague Ship

R. Garcia y Robertson

1 . The Doughnut Hole

The distress call came in out
of the cold and empty, after
crawling for hundreds of
hours at light speed, spread-
ing through coded traffic and
the singing static from the ga-
lactic core. Software studied
the signal, deciding to thaw
out the crew of the Hiyo Maru.
Preservatives drained out of
Muskrat, to be replaced by
warmed-over blood and stimu-
lants. Heat pumps brought her
to body temperature. She un-
sealed her Sleep Coffin and
sat up, brown eyes blinking: a
chronometer on the control
console told her nearly two
decades had passed since she
went into Sleep.

Preservation always played
hell with her brain’s electrical
states, sabotaging short-term
memory, never letting her re-
member the actual act of go-
ing into Sleep. She recognized
the cluttered interior of a stan-
dard ram-command module —
galley, recycler, and auto-doc
aft; Sleep Coffins and acceler-
ation couches forward. What
Muskrat could not remember
was boarding this particular
ship, climbing into her coffin
and strapping on the needles.
The last thing she could recall
was Keidport, a spectral hub

Illustration by Tom Miller

of domes and metal webbing, forming a low-gee kalei-
doscope of cheap holos and feelie arcades. She was
standing by in a tube-station grog spigot, asking an ama-
teur hustler how to find the shuttle to the outsystem
berths. Then wham, she was waking up aboard ship in
interstellar space, close to twenty years later.

Only calendar years of course, nonrelativistic Newto-
nian decades, a time scale devised millennia ago by very
ignorant Dirtsiders. Still, it was damned eerie.

Stray Dog had gone through a different wake-up,
based on his alien biology. Propped on his hind limbs,
he looked like an upright yellow-brown baboon with
tufted ears, whose grandmother had married a short-
nosed hyena. Rows of stiff brown bristles ran down his
back. An Eridani Hound has a diffuse nervous system,
relying on instinct more than temporary memory, and
never seems to suffer human-type memory losses. He
was already reviewing the distress signal. The speakbox
around his neck rattled off a distilled litany: “Lifeboat
type auto-beacon. No ID prefix. Straight out of the
Doughnut Hole. No other contact reports.” Stray Dog
punched an acknowledgment, alerting future contacts
that the message was read and being acted on by the
Hiyo Maru.

Muskrat ducked her head under the doppler hood;
her curly brown hair was cut short to keep it from snag-
ging. The scope produced an in-depth simulation of lo-
cal space-time: nearby and current contacts appeared
close; others faded into longer ago and farther away.

She adjusted the doppler to look deeper into the Dough-
nut Hole. Any decent edition of the Systems Guide notes
an empty gulf ten to twenty light-years across separating
Sol and Alpha C from the Sirian Systems — a hole amid
the systems of Human Space. Such holes are not rare;
an even larger one sits on the far side of Alpha C. What
makes the Doughnut Hole worthy of a name is the sur-
rounding ring of major inhabited systems, all more or
less in the same galactic plane. Running clockwise from
Sol around the rim of the Hole are Alpha C, Ursae Ma-
joris Sector, the Sirian Systems, the Near Eridani, Home
Sector, then Sol again. In the middle sits the Hole, a
black pit of background radiation, burnt-out stars, sun-
less planets, and dark matter. Muskrat had heard all the
stories told in port bars about whispering contacts, pi-
rate strongholds, and haunted derelicts in the Doughnut
Hole. But she also knew that, like most of the universe,
the Hole was just horribly empty — no place to be lost in
a ship’s lifeboat. So far from home, a call for help was
like a message tossed overboard in a bottle, taking years
to lap up at a friendly port.

She whistled. The sending ship showed up like a qua-
sar dropping from near half light speed, aimed smack at
Alpha C.

Pulling her head out of the doppler hood, she told
the computer to crunch through the navigation num-
bers. The Hiyo Maru, coming in from Keid A, was on a
converging track ahead of the signaling ship. Intercept
solutions arched across her screens, fountains of colored
lines representing different options. Most fell short. She
frowned and said, “We could just do it: decelerate, shift

vectors, let it catch up, then match velocities. That would
mean dumping our load. ...” The Hiyo had two parts to
her, a ram-command module and a detachable cargo
module. They could send the cargo module free-falling
toward Alpha C at near light speed. “Any other solution
takes too much reactant mass.”

Stray Dog stretched his jaws to mimic a human yawn.
“OK, we dump the cargo, but this better be worth it.”

“And they say Hounds have no heart.” She was al-
ready setting a beacon, warning wreckers that the cargo
module was not salvage, but a load in unattended tran-
sit. The cargo module c6ntained some new supercon-
ducting computers, and several vats of the best Imperial
cognac — valuable stuff, especially the cognac — but if a
crew had taken to the lifeboats, that crew came first. No
hand wanted a call for help ignored because someone’s
precious cargo was too important. An outsystem tug from
Centauri Control could catch the module, brake it into
an elliptical orbit, and eventually bring their cargo in.

She settled back in her coffin, saying, “Sweet dreams,”
though she knew in Sleep there were no dreams, no
brain activity of any sort.

Over a thousand hours later Muskrat awoke again, with
no memory of having been awake before. Hearing the
distress signal, she ordered the galley to kick out coffee
and began the routine of isolating and assessing the sig-
nal. Reaching for her coffee, she saw the amber row of
lights on the cargo panel and let out a shriek, dumping
the hot cup in her lap. “The cargo module is gone!”

“Sure.” Stray Dog flipped his speakbox to a comfort-
ing drawl. “You got absolutely plastered and dumped it.
Tried to stop you. Don’t you rememberT’

She mopped at her coveralls and hit playback, to
learn what really happened. It was spooky to hear her
own voice making decisions — important decisions — and
have no memory of them. Sleep was a necessity, im-
posed by interstellar distance and the laws of physics;
but it was also a little death, stealing something of her
each time. No wonder they called the cabinets “coffins.”

Computers had done eveiything, decelerating, match-
ing vectors, positioning them perfectly. Starboard screens
showed that the signaling ship was gigantic, twenty kilo-
meters long, a polished cylindrical whale wallowing in the
stellar sea. Despite a mind-numbing mutual velocity, the
only apparent motion was the stately rotation of the im-
mense hull, framed by the blackness between the stars.

“Welcome to the stone age.” Stray Dog’s speakbox reg-
istered contemptuous disbelief. The starship must have
begun life as a stony-iron planetoid. Someone renamed
and polished the planetoid, married it to a gargantuan
mass converter, then set the whole monstrosity whirling
around its long axis to create the semblance of gravity.

Nothing showed around the derelict — no escorts, no
lifeboats — just void. The lifeboat-type distress signal
probably came from a boat deck. With no sign of a liv-
ing crew, the cmde, sturdy ship ignored the Hiyo’s sig-
nals and bored on toward Alpha C.

The thing to do now was board. Stray Dog was al-
ready in his V-suit. She knew the xeno would never en-

R. Garcia y Robertson

Certain the notion of not going in. Penetrating the un-
known was a primal urge among Hounds — practically a
religion — and the only reason they put up with humans.

She suited up and stepped through the forward lock
onto the outer skin of the Hiyo Maru, and found herself
staring straight into the derelict’s gigantic exhaust port,
keenly aware that if this great throat so much as
coughed she would be fried down to her boot clips.

This was where vacuum hands earned their pay, doing
free-fall ballet to the music of the spheres. Waldoes
would not reach out between the stars, and thinking
robots were frightfully expensive.

“Cast off.” Stray Dog’s artificial voice never showed a
trace of concern, unless he programmed in an emotion.

Feet braced, she fired her line-gun at the exhaust
port. Her grapple hit the rim, and she cast off from the
hull of the Hiyo. Stray Dog, an artiste at suit work, did
not bother with a safety line, but sprang straight at the
rim that arched around them, twisting at mid-course to
position his feet for landing.

Muskrat was too busy to applaud. She snubbed her
own line into the winch on her suit belt, then swarmed up
the cable, swinging her boots into contact with the rim.

Stray Dog was there waiting, completely at ease on
the narrow tilted rim, his line-gun still buttoned in his
holster. He peered down at the stars spinning about the
ship’s equator. “Hey, on the outside of these old spin
ships, every direction is down.” One swift, unconscious
glance and Muskrat looked away, cursing the Hound
and calling for an anti-nausea shot from her suit. Every
direction was down. A trillion trillion kilometer fall. The
whole damned universe spun around her point in space,
tugging at her stomach and safety line, trying to throw
her into the black whirlpool of hard radiation produced
by near relativistic velocity.

Coriolis effect made her come down funny, playing
havoc with her semicircular canals. Did the damned
Hound even have semicircular canals? Probably not.
Nothing diluted the vacuum between his tufted audio-
antennae. Stray Dog was too insensitive to get dizzy,
even from drink. She had seen him walk a perfect line
down a tumbling corridor with enough boost ethanol
aboard to stagger a brontosaur.

The nearest access lock was simple mechanical, oper-
ated by bleeding air into the vacuum. The huge ship
had air to spare. But once they got inside, neither she
nor Stray Dog would be dumb enough to crack a hel-
met. Whatever disabled the crew could be lurking just
outside their visors, ready to go to work on them. They
would not risk going in with nothing but nervous grins.

The lock opened into a cavernous access shaft cut
from solid rock and braced by graceful steel ribs — glow-
tubing snaked downward out of sight. Stray Dog grap-
pled his line to the lock and began to rappel down the
rock surface in regulation style. Muskrat followed him
into the immense emptiness, using her suit winch to slow
her descent. By the time she hit bottom the spin gravity
felt close to one gee, a tiring one-third above ship nor-
mal. The deck was slightly canted to compensate for the
deceleration and keep “down” directly underneath.

Leaving their dangling lines, they set out. Everything
about the enormous ship had a dead feel to it: the still
air carried no hum of air conditioning; dust and debris
created an archaic feeling, as though Muskrat was ex-
ploring some titanic undiscovered tomb. As she walked
she sensed a rhythm, not a mechanical beat, something
more like music, far off but getting closer. Following the
distress signal through a maze of ramps and branching
corridors, searching for the boat deck, Muskrat realized
the music was coming from ship’s speakers somewhere
ahead of her. Drawing closer, she could make out words:

You ask for safety,

You ask for shelter,

Just take what’s coming round now . . .

She recognized Circle of Fire, a popular pseudo-rock
serenade from a century or so back. The song was being
played over and over again, a demented counterpoint to
the clamoring distress signal and the tomblike emptiness.

The tunnel ahead widened into a boat deck. “Signs of
life,” Stray Dog said, pointing to piles of trash. Sweeper
robots, huge metal crabs with cleaning attachments,
crouched idle among the litter, turned into grotesque
squatting statues by a powerdown.

A rumpled human figure appeared among the sweep-
ers — a blond giant with sunken eyes, bulging muscles,
and a bad growth of stubble. He did a wary, instinctive
double-take, and Muskrat recognized a walking case of
the high-velocity jitters. The man collected himself, eyed
them over a too-broad smile, and gave his name as Toom.
“Crack your headgear. The air’s not bad, not great, but
not bad either.”

As they opened their visors. Muskrat saw the man’s
attitude do another flip-flop. His eyes widened, then
narrowed, saying “Woman!” then “Xeno.” Toom mum-
bled apologies for the mess, as if they cared how the
ship looked. “Sorry, internal sanitation is all locked down.
One of the guys got stuffed down a waste disposal slot
by a gang of sweepers with their screws loose.”

“Ingenious way to tidy up.” Heavy sarcasm signaled
that Stray Dog had not liked the look he got. The Hound
knew more about human faces than he admitted.

“Yeah, he was a big guy too, before the sweepers took
him apart. We figured we could live with a little mess.”

Muskrat had seen snakebit crews before, coming in
from really bad runs, with faraway looks and smmbling
speech, but looking into Toom’s eyes was like seeing
down to the surface of a gas giant, where the air was
pressed flat by kilometers of pressure. The entire ship
reeked of bad luck and worse karma.

“Got ourselves a humdinger vi-rus." Toom tossed the
explanation over his shoulder. “Chou can tell you. He’s
stupendous at talking about it, can keep on that subject
for hours at a stretch. And, ah, welcome to the Ark of
Halcyon."

The ship’s name was Sirian, which explained a lot. The
boat deck looked like it had been turned inside-out and
shaken loose. Repair projects, empty chassis, and junked
components lay scattered about, alongside coconut husks

Plague Ship

and stained teacups. The distress signal was coming from
an opened-up lifeboat, a tiny starship stranded amid the
mess.

“Meet Mr. Chou.” Toom indicated a lanky chocolate-
colored figure sitting cross-legged eating with chopsticks.
Chou slid his meal tray out of the way, making room for
Muskrat and Stray Dog. The Arks crew had put off do-
ing dishes for some time, and Muskrat watched the lat-
est tray impact, sending ripples through a confused mass
of litter. Without having to hear it, she knew these two
men were all that remained of the crew, and must have
been surviving for months in this wreck of a living quar-
ters. It was a wonder they had not throttled each other.

Barely nodding at their names, Chou launched into a
description of the problem, punctuating sentences by
flashing readouts on a mobile monitor. The man moved
like a cat on caffeine, talking at hypeiiight speed in mul-
tiple dimensions. The rest of the crew was dead, either
killed in their Sleep Coffins, or chewed up by machinery
gone berserk. Aside from playing Circle of Fire over and
over again, the ship’s comnet was unresponsive, so Chou
had to use a lifeboat’s autobeacon just to call for help.

“Its an Imp computer virus, slow and subtle.” His hol-
low eyes lit up. Any dedicated software jockey had to dig
a sweet program, even one that was doing him in. In-
cluded in Chou’s visual aids was a casualty list. Name
after name. Muskrat recognized one, a hand named Gor-
die Shaw. She remembered a cheerful guy with an elfin
grin, very fond of singing the songs of Earth. Ages ago
in the Far Eridani, she, Gordie, and a bottle of bourbon
had showered together. They had taken turns swigging
from the bottle and lathering each other’s bodies. It was
a semieducational shower, and she had gotten to know
parts of Gordie quite intimately. From time to time she
had wondered what happened to Gordie. Now she knew.

“What is so subtle about stuffing people down waste
slots, or chilling everyone in Sleep?”

Chou lost his thousand-light-year stare, looking right
at her. “Oh, the virus is out to get us, but life goes on.”

“Tell that to the stiffs in Sleep.” Muskrat was imagin-
ing the mass converter running wild or the ramscoop
collapsing. Catastrophic failure. One instant you were
thrilling to your favorite feelie on the three-V and the
next nanosecond you were a greasy streak on the void.
Such thoughts made her fidget.

“This virus is locked out of the drive and main pow-
er,” said Chou, taking an uncanny dip into her stream of
consciousness. “Drive and power are a sealed system.
Sirians bought them straight from an Imperial dockyard.”

Muskrat gave a grunt of approval. Imps made their
own hardware virus-immune; it upped their competitive
advantage in peace or war. “Are Imps and Sirians at it
again?” She liked to imagine she was on friendly terms
with the cosmos, but a dozen wars could have started
during two decades in Sleep.

Chou shrugged. “Maybe this virus is left over from
the last war, maybe it is the beginning of the next one.
Once turned loose they mix and mutate.”

Muskrat nodded. “Look, I never met a computer I
didn’t detest. If your Housekeeping unit has an Imp

virus, or just the galloping hiccups, let’s shut it down,
zero the circuits, blast every byte in the bugger. You can
bunk with us in the Hiyo and Centauri Control can deal
with your rogue software.”

Chou was aghast. “We can’t close down. Not until we
repair the damage in Number One Hold. The cargo there
is worth mega-megacredits.” During Chou’s visuals. Musk-
rat had scanned the cargo manifest. The Hiyo's cargo of
fast brains and fine brandy was not one-millionth as ex-
pensive as what the Ark of Halcyon was hauling.

“We have to do this clean-up right,” Chou insisted,
“then settle back into the Sleep Chamber until we get to
Alpha C.”

She shook her head. “Look, your Sleep Chamber is a
goddamned morgue now. Come bunk with us. Our life-
boats have a pair of spare coffins.”

Chou’s gaze retreated into the infinite, his eyes be-
coming quantum black holes fixed somewhere south of
Vega. “Closing down is the lasertorch approach. I am
cleaning out Housekeeping, isolating sections, zeroing
them out, then reconstructing the software. It is the slow
way, but it will get us control.” The last word rolled out
like holy writ — Chou was a control freak sunk in serious
chaos, a frightening combination.

“I like the lasertorch,” declared Muskrat. She turned
to Stray Dog for support. “What do you say?”

Her heart sank: no help there. The xeno was stripping
off his suit, making himself at home. His speakbox an-
swered, “Human, Stray Dog is busy at the moment. Leave
your ID number. He will be happy to return your signal.”

She glared at the Hound, knowing that whatever
Hounds used for hormones fed on finding problems and
overcoming them. He had to prove he was tougher than
the task waiting in the hold. Seeing her stare. Stray Dog
turned his speakbox to a more accommodating tone, ap-
pealing to her professionalism. “Look, we’re here, light-
years from anywhere, with a task to be done and a chance
to be tremendously overpaid for doing it. Let’s help
bring this cargo in, then file an unearthly salvage claim.”

Grimly she agreed. It was that or sit in the Hiyo and
sulk, while Stray Dog worked alone. The Hound had
money and pride on his side, and all she had was a
heavy sense of foreboding.

Chou became brisk, speaking past her to Toom. “I
can keep clearing the Housekeeping circuits. Take these
two and repair the effects of the powerdown in Number
One Hold. The virus made more of a mess there than
the SuperChimps can handle.” He raised his hand like a
skinny black Buddha giving a blessing. “And Toom, try
not to waste too much time pawing her. Number One
Hold needs serious attention.”

She shed her suit, following Toom and Stray Dog
down the huge hallway to the nearest hold entrance.
Every corridor in the ship was built big enough for a
marching band, but the only music filling the great hol-
low space was the chorus coming over the comnet:

There comes a feeling

There comes a reeling

Your world whirls around now . . .

R. Garcia y Robertson

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W hen the dying land

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means nothing. But from the
beginning of her journey east-
ward to answer the summoning,
the fates are against her.

Hunted by demons and pos-
sessing a talisman that awakens
strange powers within her, she
learns that her curious prophesy
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Toom leaned into her personal space. “Don’t it both-
er you to bunk with a dog?”

Muskrat shrugged. “He’s got no human diseases.” She
edged away, dialing herself a chemical cocktail from her
medikit, artificial enthusiasm to send her into the hold.
Muskrat guessed Chou was your generic vacuum hand,
while Toom was the one real Sirian left onboard. He
was tall, blond, and self-confident; clearly raised on
steroids in a system that venerated the human form.

Shuffling down the corridor, she thought about Gor-
die and the shore leave she shared with him. She sup-
posed it would only be worse if she had known him
better. Hands were always leaving each other behind;
space-time was too big for anything but good-byes. She
saved sorry facts like that for times like this.

A SuperChimp was waiting for them at the hold en-
trance, a hulking female with a pair of needle guns
slung over her shoulder. She punched a set key on a
speakbox similar to Stray Dog’s. “Greetings, Masters.
Hello, fellow Inferior. You may call me Kay-Tee.”

Toom took one of the rifles and checked the gun’s
action, chambering a charge with a single swift motion.
The Chimp handed Muskrat the second rifle. Muskrat
hefted the heavy plastic, then handed it off to Stray Dog.
Kay-Tee’s eyes widened, and she fingered her speak-
box. “Is this Inferior intelligent?”

Stray Dog pulled back his thick lips to show his fangs.
“Who’s inferior. Hairy Human?” That was what Hounds
called SuperChimps.

“He talks,” admitted Muskrat. “Intelligent would be
stretching things, but let him have the rifle. Being nei-
ther an Imp nor a Sirian, I am not happy to be fighting
old battles, or starting new ones.”

Kay-Tee seemed completely scandalized, hairy chin
hanging down. Toom had his hand on the hatch lever.
“Neither Imp nor Sirian? What system are you from?”

“Old Earth,” said Muskrat.

“Never heard of the place.” He spun the lock lever.

Stray Dog keyed a dictionary entry. “Old Earth — Sol
III, Terra, Gaia, etc. Supposed ancient home of humans.”

“That old myth?” Toom jerked the hatch open. “What
you see in this hold might open your mind a bit.”

The hatch slid aside. There was no airlock separating
the corridor from the cargo hold. Muskrat stepped di-
rectly into a steep-sided green glen, divided by a glassy
brook. Impossibly tall pines covered the slopes on ei-
ther side. A wet salt breeze stirred her hair, and down-
stream she could see wave caps in a patch of blue wa-
ter. Beneath her feet was a deep carpet of ferns and
sedges, dotted with flowering plants.

2. Into the Hold

Muskrat found the view from Carnivore Station ridicu-
lously extravagant. The station stood at the confluence
of two steep valleys separated by a flickering static fence
— one valley stretching northward to the land bridge and
herbivore country, while the other ran southward deep-
er into carnivore country. Erom a knoll overlooking the
station she could survey the sweep of Number One Hold.

To the north she could see the blue-green equatorial sea,
bounded by an island chain and the land bridge. The
tops of tall palms and cycads marked the swamplands
and salt marsh along the seashore. To the south, groves
of pines and cypress ran along the streambed, merging
with a towering forest of giant sequoias. The ship’s spin
put the pull of gravity beneath her feet, more or less
where it belonged: “north” was forward and “south” was
aft; “east” and “west” curved upward with the hull. Gen-
tle deceleration, which had toppled all of the taller se-
quoias, gave a disturbing southward tilt to the landscape.

Hot heavy air vibrated with menace, and the lack of
horizons bothered Muskrat. The turgid sea curved up-
ward at both ends, as though its waters were too listless
to run downhill. Heights disappeared into the low cloud
cover hiding an artificial sun. The mini-world was crowd-
ed into the short and middle distance, forming a distort-
ed landscape filled with reminders that Muskrat was in-
side a huge hollow starship, not on some primeval planet.

Catastrophe had already hit Carnivore Station. Shat-
tered geodome sections were scattered about, ripped,
shredded and trampled — some pieces pressed a hand’s
span into the ground. Torn plastic flapped in the slow
breeze off the water. She saw no sign of the SuperChimps
that were supposed to run the station. Chimps showed
keen judgment on occasion.

Toom stood with both feet planted in a single herbi-
vore print gouged out of the wet sand, and gave her a
friendly leer. “When that herd came thundering through,
SuperChumps must have scattered like monkeys in a cy-
clone.” Muskrat glanced over her shoulder at Kay-Tee,
squatting patiently behind her. The SuperChimp’s hu-
manoid face was impassive, one hand lying ready on
her speakbox. Toom went on talking, pointing with his
needle-gun to indicate direction. “A few weeks back
Chimps brought a small herd over the land bridge to
graze in this valley. In the middle of the night alarms
went off and the static fence collapsed. The herd bolted,
stampeding over the station into carnivore country.”

His smile turned gleeful. “Imagine this place in pitch
blackness, alarms howling, six-ton herbivores climbing
over everything, squashing apes, bellowing in blind ter-
ror. It’s enough to loosen your anal sphincter before you
can get your coveralls down.” He was plainly pleased
by that tableau.

Hyper-tense, Muskrat did not find him funny. She
was staggered by the size of the four-toed prints pitting
the landscape. Knowing and seeing are separate reali-
ties. The quality of light said it was early morning in the
hold, so get the job done, she thought, then get some
sleep. More complications would send her spinning out
of control into total collapse. “What now?”

“We go find ’em, and herd ’em out of carnivore coun-
try. Each one of these monsters is worth too much to
have them chewing on each other.” Toom set off fol-
lowing the wide trail of trampled honeysuckle and up-
rooted pines.

Stray Dog hefted his needle-gun, tapping her on the
shoulder. “So get it done, then find the fun.” His speak-
box parroted the Sirian’s drawl perfectly.

R. Garcia y Robertson

Muskrat joined at what she hoped was a safe dis-
tance. A few steps and she was among the tall sequoias,
closing around her, forming a lofty cathedral forest lit by
shafts of filtered sunlight. Fallen trunks of forest giants
were stacked thick enough to hide anything. She could
see stubs of branches pruned by browsers who reached
limbs ten meters up the trees. Snapping twigs gave her
seizures, but all she saw were little green grass frogs un-
derfoot. Maybe not grass frogs; Muskrat had seen no
blade of grass so far, just ferns, horsetails, moss, sedges,
and a shrub that might be magnolia.

The trail turned when it reached the tall palisades
separating the highland valleys. Here the herd had hit
the cliffs and caromed southward. Toom fell back from
the point to check with Chou. Muskrat could hear Circle
of Fire coming over his comlink as he talked — thorough-
ly sick of the song, she had her own comlink locked
down and lying in her coveralls pocket.

The Sirian turned and smiled, locking down his com-
link. “What are you doing when we’re done?”

“Done?” They had hardly begun.

“Sure, figure we’ll have this mess wrapped up tomor-
row at the latest.”

“What time tomorrow?”

Toom laughed, looping his arm around her shoulder.
“Come on, tell me what you gonna do.”

“Sleep,” she said.

“Alone?”

Muskrat shook herself alert. “Hit replay?” The ship
was crawling through the black chasm between the
stars, light-years from anywhere, a sadistic virus control-
ling Housekeeping, while they hunted hyperthyroid
monsters through the forest primeval; and this loon
wanted to see her coveralls down around her ankles?

“Well, you got a clear choice between me and Chou.”

“Right, and I’m the only female for ten trillion kilome-
ters.” She waved to where Stray Dog was trotting ahead.
“Shouldn’t you be taking the point or something?”

Toom smiled. “Let’s say you are the only female who
isn’t lying in our Sleep Chamber with the temperature
turned too low and her legs frozen together.”

“You know, Toom, I’ve heard that put more gallantly.”

“Just trying to be straight with you,” chuckled the Sir-
ian. “Honesty is important in a relationship. You don’t
want us to start off all wrong. It’s a long way to Alpha C.”

“Take your troubles to Kay-Tee.” She nodded toward
the SuperChimp. “If she turns you down. I’ll try to grab
you on the rebound.”

Toom laughed at the hulking Kay-Tee. “You got hu-
mor, girl. Who would hump a SuperChump?”

She gave him a grim smile. “It’s a long way to Alpha C.”

Stray Dog stopped, selecting a pleasant contralto on
his speakbox. “Something’s ahead.” Muskrat felt her
breath stop. “Something big and dead.” Stray Dog raised
his needle-gun, pointing to shadows soaring over the
treetops, huge stork shapes cutting wide circles under
the cloud cover.

“Damn,” snorted Toom. “If one of those pin-headed
herbivores died . . .’’He broke into a run that Muskrat
was forced to match. Even a walnut-brained carnivore

could read those carrion signs, and she wanted to be
close to the needle-guns if something with more teeth
than sense came storming out of the pines.

She heard the horror ahead before she saw it — gmnts,
squawks, and vicious barking accompanied a sinister rip-
ping. Keeping behind Stray Dog, she scrambled up the
slope to a small rock shelf above the trail. From there she
could see straight down into a gully about twenty meters
below, where great fanged creatures thrashed about in a
pit full of gore. One of the lead herbivores had careened
f^ull tilt into the gully, and the terrified herd had stamped-
ed over the living bridge. The trampled herbivore was
more than dead; it was being gutted and devoured by a
pack of huge hairless carnivores with tiger-striped hides,
long tails, powerful hind legs, and hideous table manners.
Leaping about, they slashed at the herbivore with sickle-
shaped claws, carving off strips of skin and meat, gulp-
ing down the bloody hunks without taking time to chew.
The only intact part of the herbivore was its massive
horned head, one cold yellow eye glaring up at Muskrat.

Toom sat down on the small lip of stone. “Do you
know just how much that herbivore is worth?”

Stray Dog peered down and tapped his speakbox.
“Not so much now, unless you fancy ground dinosaur.
Always found it tough and gamey myself.”

“The full cost of this feed is coming out of our con-
tract.” Toom crossed his legs, resting his rifle on his
knees and looking up at Muskrat. “"Well, here’s your liv-
ing proof that humans do not come from Old Dirt or
whatever you call it.” She tried to shift focus, but could
not block out the sights and snarls from the pit.

“Shows how far back our Archives go,” declared
Toom. “Sirian Grand Dukes had star travel millions of
years before there were any Imps, Terrans, or other so-
called civilizations.” Muskrat could see his argument.
Earth had the pyramids, the Great 'Wall, and a few thou-
sand years of written history; but Halcyon had dinosaurs.
Prehistoric saurians were the pride of the Sirian Archives,
prime evidence that civilization on Halcyon predated hu-
man life on Earth by sixty-odd million years. She watched
one of the big stork-vultures settle down on the horned
head and peck at the huge unseeing eye.

“Even a xeno can see it.” Toom tried to drag the six-
fingered Hound into the debate on human origins.

Stray Dog moved his shoulders up and down, imitat-
ing a human shrug. His speakbox said, “Hard to argue
with science.”

“Do it all the time,” said Muskrat, “when I’m in the
mood.” Right then she did not want a quasireligious de-
bate with a dedicated Humanist and a talking hyena, not
while giant flesh feeders barked and burped below them.
“We got serious work to do. Let’s find the herd before
this pack finishes eating and is hungry again.”

Toom got up. “Wouldn’t worry about these boys.
They’re small carnosaurs. The really big ones have twice
the length and ten times the mass.” Muskrat decided that
“small” must be an impossibly relative term. The horrors
below were twice as tall as she was, with the mass of a
good-sized ground car. They squabbled over the intes-
tines like tiger-striped iguanas at a spaghetti-eating

contest. She saw two of them fighting over the same
strand, eating their way to the middle. When they were
snout to snout the bigger carnosaur jerked its head back,
pulling a couple of meters of dinner out of the other’s
gullet, then snapped it off and gulped it down. And peo-
ple said that dinosaurs were dumb.

Unlocking his comlink, Toom checked in with Chou.
No music in the background. Circle of Fire no longer
filled the comlink. Barely believing it. Muskrat searched
her sweaty coveralls, going through a dozen pockets,
slots, and zip flaps, until she found her own comlink.

“See,” she heard Chou say, “no need for a lasertorch,
pry bar, or powerhammer.” The man was basking in his
own genius. “Just takes time. The virus had thousands
of hours to work its way into the system, being benign
and cooperative. Hell, some of this half-assed Sirian soft-
ware runs better with the virus attached.”

Toom cut in, sounding testy. “Meanwhile we lost an
herbivore.” Muskrat guessed the Sirian was not pleased
by the deeper reasons behind his job. The Ark of Halcy-
on had obviously been an orbital playpen for the Grand
Dukes of Sirius. Now the Ark was headed for Alpha C,
where it presumably would become a preserve for some
Imperial parks and recreation syndicate with more credit
than taste. The Sirian Dukes must have hit the wall hard,
and were selling off their most prized prerogative, the
privilege of owning and hunting prehistoric saurians.

The Empire produced everything else cheaper and bet-
ter, and credit does not come easy in a cutthroat cosmos.

Chou was not disturbed. “Those horned herbivores
are just backdrop, but we cannot have them tangling with
the carnivores and sticking something really valuable.
The carnosaurs are what people will pay for. Where’s
the challenge to hunting house-sized vegetarians, unless
you plan to do it with a pry bar or sonic bug swatter?”

“Whatever happened to survival of the fittest?” Musk-
rat would have let the monsters work out their own
problems, rather than play dinosaur cruise director.

“Too expensive,” said Chou. “Sirians packed in too
many carnosaurs for a balanced ecology. Cheaper to
have the Chimps feed the big boys from frozen carrion.”

And maybe a SuperChimp or two just to top it off.
Muskrat locked down her comlink. Toom was looking
her over. “So the man’s a computer genius,” he said. “He
is also a nigrified chink who never cleans up, probably
has diseases they haven’t invented drugs for.”

She closed her eyes, willing herself into a dimension
light-years away. The Sirian’s drawl followed her. “But if
you’re getting stuck on him, we can swing some time-
sharing. I mean, Chou’s okay, if you can take the odor.
There’s time between here and Alpha C for both of us.”

“I hope you two are happy together.” The man suf-
fered from massive testosterone poisoning, and Muskrat
knew she might have to give in just to get some peace.
To her immense relief Kay-Tee came scurrying up, bow-
ing, scraping, and begging their pardons. Toom wanted
to know what could be so damned important.

The SuperChimp set her speakbox to contrite apolo-
gy. “Forgive me, Master. I did not mean to disturb your
courtship display. We have the herbivores.”

“Where?” Toom sounded more irritated than the news
warranted. Kay-Tee indicated a rock saddle between two
pinnacles where a Chimp was running back and forth.
Muskrat could hear the alarm signals that Chimps used
among themselves. It surprised her that Kay-Tee could
fix the herd from some hooting and running about, but
Chimps had a secret life their “masters” often missed.

Climbing to the saddle, they found a Chimp trail lead-
ing along rock runways across an almost vertical land-
scape between the treetops and the low-hanging mist.
The path was easy going, dinosaur-free, and all but in-
visible from the ground. Muskrat was impressed. It beat
tramping through the tangle below, too scared to spit and
expecting to get stepped on. Her impulse was to hand
the rifles and the job over to the Chimps, who seemed
to know what they were up to.

Toom and Stray Dog bounded on ahead. When she
caught up to them they were standing on a spur of rock
where the highlands thinned into a narrow wedge point-
ing toward tall overhanging cliffs. Muskrat guessed that
these cliffs must be the hold’s aft bulkhead. Between the
spur and the rocky bulkhead was a steep pass connect-
ing one narrow valley to the next. The valley beyond the
pass had a completely different ecology, semi-desert with
soil too shallow to support anything bigger than berry
bushes. The mist overhead thinned, letting in more arti-
ficial sunlight. Muskrat could see how in the highlands the
inner surface of the hold was a labyrinth of sharp ridges
running along the axis of the ship. This winding land-
scape gave the illusion of space, creating long vistas down
the narrow valleys, hiding the true curvature of the hold.

The herbivores were grazing near the mouth of the
pass; perhaps they had not liked the stark landscape in
the next valley. Intact they were impressive — massive
ceratopsians with huge neck frills and three sharp horns,
colored deep blue-green with a darker stripe along the
spine. She heard Toom on the comlink to Chou. “We
got them. But it would be a bad business trying to herd
them back down the valley. They got a real cafeteria
here compared to the overgrazed areas in herbivore
country. You have to get some grav sleds going.” Musk-
rat could see that the big beasts were happily mowing
through the berry bushes and pine seedlings.

Chou came through crisp and cocksure. “I cleared the
comlink, didn’t I? You can have grav sleds, flitters, what-
ever. I have the virus backed into the Sleep Chamber and
hangar circuits. The little bugger’s about to be his-to-ry.”

“’Bout time.” Toom was not cutting Chou any slack.
Muskrat saw that the computer operator’s easy success
was wearing on the Sirian. “Fast-forward us some sleds.”

“I’ll get the Chimps working on it.” Chou broke con-
tact with a sharp click. Muskrat thought twenty kilome-
ters of starship might hold two male egos comfortably,
but it was beginning to look like a close fit. Months of
enforced togetherness had brought Toom and Chou to
the end of their tethers. To take off some of the tension,
she made sure she was paired with Stray Dog for the
shoot. The xeno was all ego, but found humans sexually
unappetizing. Toom and Kay-Tee went to fire from the
far side of the pass.

R. Garcia y Robertson

Muskrat asked the Hound to show her how to shoot.
She did not like the rifles, but they should not remain a
mystery, amplifying her fears.

“First you need to learn to draw down the charge.”
The Hound took a fresh charge from his belt and tossed
it to her. “At full charge one of these will knock a thirty-
ton sauropod tail over toenails in midstride, killing any-
thing smaller. So don’t stick yourself with the probe.”

Muskrat held tight to the plastic charge, keeping the
thin needle-sharp probe pointed away from her.

Stray Dog indicated a knob on the charge. “Pull this
bolt back. The notches correspond roughly to a quarter-
ton of body mass. These herbivores here are over six tons;
set the bolt a couple of dozen notches from the bottom.”

Gingerly she drew back the bolt. “And if they were
under a quarter-ton?”

“Everything under a quarter-ton gets the minimum
dose. Needle-guns are not for sticking frogs. Something
seems too small to you, just step on it.”

“Frogs I’m not afraid of. What if the charge is set low
and something bigger leaps out at me?” She did not
want to admit it aloud, but the thought of trying to reset
the charge with panicky fingers terrified her. The largest
carnivores could easily outrun humans.

“Then you empty the chamber,” Stray Dog pumped
the rifle and a charge came flying out sideways, falling
at her feet. “The next charge is always set at full. If that
is too complicated, just pull the trigger twice — probably
what a panicky human would do anyway. But remem-
ber, that second shot is a sure kill; don’t use it unless
you have to.”

She was still hoping not to fire a first shot.

Stray Dog laid out a dozen charges for her to draw
down, then curled up to wait for Toom’s signal. “Set
them all for over six tons. I’m shooting the big ones.
Toom can have the juveniles.”

Stray Dog’s arrogant unconcern made Muskrat even
more nervous about the coming shoot. “How do you
even know where to hit them?” She was wondering if
the charges would work somewhere safe, like the tip of
the tail. Muskrat could imagine herself taking on a
sleeping dinosaur, stealing up and spiking the lizard at
the point farthest from the jaws.

“The charge works almost anywhere — but go for the
belly, it’s big and hard to miss. The head is the only bad
spot on old triceratops.” His speakbox rolled out the word
in professorial tones. “From head on all you see is beak,
horns, and bony collar. You never want to fire at a cera-
topsian charging flat out for you; worst shot imaginable.”

“Right.” She watched Toom and Kay-Tee stroll across
the pass, as easily as if the grazing dinosaurs were great
boulders strewn about. If the herd bolted again and stam-
peded through the pass, Toom would have nothing but
head shots, studded with horns and galloping at him.

“So where do you shoot when one charges you?” A
useful piece of trivia to file away for panicky moments.

“You aim for the muscles that anchor the frill, but be
careful not to poke out an eye. Surgery on these brutes
is tricky.”

“Well, sure. It might pay better to lie down and let

them run over me; give the autodoc something easy to
work on.”

She heard the shoot signal come over the comlink,
and saw Stray Dog spread full out on the ledge, resting
the needle-gun on the rocky lip. He started pulling the
trigger, pausing only to shift the barrel tip to cover a
new target. The first ceratopsians fell while their neigh-
bors grazed, not showing the leasj concern. When half
the beasts were down the survivors started to squawk,
their cries bellowing through the thick air. They lifted
huge heads out of the greenery and turned their heavy
hindquarters, swiveling on short front legs, searching for
the threat. But there was no danger to be seen. Little
beasts lay prone in hiding, malignant bacteria dropping
them one by one.

The last to fall backed toward each other, forming a
pathetic ring with their young in the center. Homs and
neck frills faced outward, beaks snorting fear and defi-
ance. Muskrat stood frozen, watching Stray Dog shift his
aim, shooting over their bony heads, hitting those on
the far side from behind. Toom must have done the
same, their shots crossing in midflight, going straight to
the soft center of the herd circle.

She breathed out as the bedlam ceased, realizing she
had held her breath for most of the shoot. The pass fell
silent, except for bird calls and the wind whistling be-
tween stone spires. Stray Dog rose to one knee, cham-
bering fresh charges. “Easy as frying flies in a microwave.”

Muskrat saw the SuperChimps coming, riding on grav
sleds, and heard Toom tell Chou through the comlink
that the Chimps were none too soon. There was a cool
edge to Chou’s reply. If there was a real feud develop-
ing, then this disaster was pretty near perfect. She fol-
lowed Stray Dog down the trail. From the floor of the
pass the still forms of the ceratopsians became miniature
hills thmsting up among the chewed-over seedlings, mak-
ing Muskrat feel sad, though they were merely sleeping
and would awake in safer circumstances. “I cannot see
why anyone would want to hunt them,” she murmured.

“Rich Imps will buy anything^” explained Toom, plain-
ly bitter about having to sell off his system’s pride.

Still awed. Muskrat made the honest mistake of ask-
ing, “Can you really think that humans brought these
beasts to Halcyon so long ago?”

“Scientific Humanism tells me so,” insisted the Sirian.
“Everything worth having is a human creation. All worth-
while inventions — most especially star travel — are prod-
ucts of human imagination. Xenos, Chumps and all oth-
er beings are, strictly speaking, lower animals.”

“Careful, some of the animals are armed.” She saw
Stray Dog strutting triumphantly atop the largest cer-
atopsian. Such talk could send him into a carnivorous
frenzy; fortunately he tended to tune out human chatter
when his hunting instincts took over.

Toom did not seem concerned. “Sure, they hear and
talk, but only because we taught them. We built their
speakboxes. We gave them the stars. Human species su-
periority is as real as relativity; not admitting it makes
you Imps and Terrans victims of pathological species
self-hatred.”

Plague Ship

Muskrat looked away. She thought Scientific Human-
ism resulted from serious brain malfunction on a system-
wide basis. Always being beaten by the Imps must have
given the Sirians a crushing inferiority complex, but she
hesitated to point this out to a muscular neurotic hold-
ing a gun designed for dinosaur.

Toom bore down on her. “I suppose you subscribe to
the other theory?”

“What theory is that, Toom?”

“The theory that some mysterious xenos explored this
section of the spiral arm sixty million years ago. These
unknown xenos visited the local worlds, stored what
they found in vaults on Halcyon, then just as mysteri-
ously vanished.”

She could tell by the stress on “mysterious” that the
Sirian thought the evidence for this story was slim. To
her, one story made as much sense as the other. The
Archives on Halcyon held impressive exhibits from the
uppermost Cretaceous, as well as from the last few cen-
turies. They were terribly thin on the eons between. If
the Sirian Grand Dukes had really invented star travel in
time to collect the last of the dinosaurs, they must have
spent the next sixty thousand millennia sitting on Hal-
cyon and feeling proud.

A shout from Stray Dog’s speakbox saved Muskrat
from answering. She saw the Hound pointing his nee-
dle-gun up the sunlit pass. There was the sight she had
most feared. Two tawny carnivores were charging
through the gap, teeth gleaming, tails lashing. The ones
she had seen feeding were poor relations; here came
the real thing, twin terrors twelve meters long and able
to swallow her whole.

Rooted, she watched the pair come on, realizing a
whole hunting pack could be hidden by the pass. Stray
Dog and Toom did not seem concerned. The Hound
scrambled down from his dinosaur, striding over to
where Toom stood. Both of them popped the charges
out of their rifle chambers, discussing the oncoming
carnosaurs’ bulk in professional tones. Then they reload-
ed and Stray Dog stepped away from Toom. They raised
their rifles.

“Shoot,” Muskrat said to herself. Man and xeno just
stood there, letting the tyrannosaurs careen closer, gap-
ing jaws showing off ferocious dental work. Muskrat
could count the sharp straight teeth.

Toom and Stray Dog fired. The carnosaurs came skid-
ding to a stop in a cloud of dust and snapping saplings.
Muskrat exhaled and sat down.

Toom turned to her. “So, what happened to them?”

“Happened to who?” She gave him a weary glance,
wishing he would stop hammering her with questions.

“The unknown xenos who are supposed to have
brought these creatures to Halcyon. Why did they just
disappear?”

Now she was supposed to answer for a bunch of
xenos no one had ever even seen. “Look around you,
Toom.” She waved at the great still forms. “Sure these
are ‘lower animals,’ but look how tremendously strong,
how terribly vital they are. For more than a hundred
million years they covered my entire planet, growing

more agile, more cunning, more adaptable. Then they
were gone, in a great dying so sudden and complete
that eons later we still argue over how it happened. On
Old Faith every land animal massing more than twenty-
five kilos disappeared forever. All that was left of them
were a few samples and embryos stored in armored
vaults on Halcyon, light-years away.”

She stood up and stuck her hands in her coveralls.
“Why ask me how it happened? Maybe sixty million
years ago death stalked through this section of the spiral
arm, and we are still shaking our heads, sifting through
the boneyard.”

3. The Red Queen

Late-afternoon sunlight filtered through cloud cover and
pine tops from the vibrating power source at the center
of the hold. Time in the hold was no longer computer-
modulated; now it ran off a simple twenty-three-hour
timer, tuned to the short Mesozoic day. Muskrat watched
while the SuperChimps grappled the sleeping ceratop-
sians onto grav sleds, working with the final circle of gi-
ants, where the herd had made its last stand. Parents lay
in a broken ring around their young.

Toom was slowly waking from a nap. Too agitated to
sleep. Muskrat admired the lack of imagination that pro-
duces such mindless composure. She saw him stir, yawn,
look around and unlock his comlink.

Suddenly the SuperChimps were screaming and hoot-
ing. She turned to see two of them dashing about the
big circle of sleeping ceratopsians, chased by a baby tri-
ceratops three meters long and massing a couple of tons.
Toom had cut the charge too fine. Kay-Tee came run-
ning up, begging her masters to shoot and save the two
Chimps. Toom leaned on his needle-gun, laughing at
the hulking youngster’s attempts to trample the Chimps
or butt them with stubby horns. Kay-Tee kept hopping
about, pleading with him to fire.

Stray Dog was up by the pass, inspecting the sleeping
carnosaurs. Muskrat pulled a charge from Toom’s belt, set
it at two tons and shoved it into his hand: “Here, shoot.”

With studied unconcern he turned the charge over,
moving the bolt up a couple of notches. “This child here
is bigger than he looks; that was my mistake before.”
Apparently, damage to Chimps did not come out of his
contract.

The frantic SuperChimps broke in opposite directions.
Confused, the young triceratops hesitated, then went
thundering off after the closest Chimp. Toom chambered
the charge, still not firing, loath to end the show.

Muskrat made up her mind to grab the needle-gun.
Chou’s voice came over Toom’s comlink, his audio in-
flection sounding urgent. Toom listened, then growled,
“Well, park your black butt on it for a bit. We got trou-
bles of our own.” With a swift, easy motion he shoul-
dered the rifle and fired. The triceratops crashed to the
ground at the heels of the terrified Chimp.

Kay-Tee bowed and scraped something sickening,
thanking her masters profusely, which only made Musk-
rat madder. She knew Sirian SuperChimps were mind-

R. Garcia y Robertson

blocked, preprogrammed to venerate every absurd tenet
of Scientific Humanism, but such servility turned her
stomach. She did not need to see another species grovel
to know how great she was.

Muskrat had to bear the full brunt of the Chimp’s
gratitude, because as soon as Toom lowered his rifle he
was lost in conversation with Chou. When he was done
he locked down his comlink. “Our dumb chink genius
has more bad news. One of the big carnivores is on the
loose in herbivore country, must have made it through
the gap before the Chumps got the static fence back up.
Chou says to get her. Sends his regrets, says he would
come if he could.”

“Would come if he could?”

Toom smiled. “The man’s exact words.”

“How big a carnivore?” This time the quarry could
bite back. None of Muskrat’s fittings felt tight, and she
just wanted the hunt done with.

“The Red Queen. Big enough for you? Chou’s track-
ing her because the Queen has a comlink embedded in
her skull.”

“Maybe it’s a false signal?” It seemed her luck was
running pretty near perfect.

“Sent by the virus to panic us? Chou does not think
so and he is the computer jock, claims he has the virus
totally on the run.”

Stray Dog came trotting over. When Toom told him
the news, the Hound bared his fangs. “What fun,” chuck-
led the speakbox on his chest. The xeno drew a charge,
setting it for an even twelve tons.

To Muskrat this was the least fun part of an unfun
day. She had heard of the Red Queen, the only dinosaur
famous by name. Whoever had brought the dinosaurs to
Halcyon sixty million years ago had been mostly satis-
fied with eggs, embryos, and gene samples; but the Red
Queen they had brought whole. She was a mst-colored
tyrannosaurus, the sole known example of a particularly
huge variety. For centuries she had stood in a transpar-
ent Sleep Chamber, the pride of the Sirian Archives, the
last product of two hundred million years of carnivore
evolution. No bigger killer had ever strode Old Earth,
not before or since.

Toom handed her his rifle. “Chou thinks we need
some spotting, so I’m going for a flitter. Here’s my nee-
dle-gun. Try not to shoot yourself in the tit. That charge
is fatal for anything under a dozen tons of body mass.”

She pushed his hand off her breast. “I’ll manage.”

Toom headed off for the hangar, saying over his shoul-
der, “See you when I’m airborne. Take the talking bipeds
with you.” He waved to indicate Kay-Tee and Stray Dog.

Muskrat watched the Chimps sled away the last
sleeping herbivores. They had thrown a portable static
fence over the two carnosaurs, to keep carrion-eaters
from chewing on them. Very neat and professional. The
fences had dumb mechanical switches, immune to virus
and dinosaur. The whole ship would be run by the
Chimps in that brute manner if Muskrat had her way,
but Chou was holding out for con-trol. She looked hun-
grily at the flickering fence, wishing she could curl up
under it and sleep for a dozen or so hours.

Kay-Tee led the trek toward herbivore country. On
the far side of the valley they struck a Chimp trail that
toiled up over the ridgeline. Chou kept calling coordi-
nates through the comlink, but Muskrat let the others
make sense out of them. Plodding along the path, she
spooked a wiry beak-nosed dinosaur no taller than she
was. Expressing very humanoid surprise, the beast
bounded off, running like a frightened little man in a
lizard suit.

“An egg-eater,” said Kay-Tee. “They roam freely over
the hold.” Muskrat recognized a slight nod toward a bal-
anced ecology. Dinosaur eggs were not particularly valu-
able, and the Ark carried thousands of them in tempera-
ture-controlled caverns. It was the big grown beasts that
everyone wanted. No one paid high prices to hunt eggs.

A buzzing sawed through the thick air, between the
pine tops and the mist. She looked up, expecting some
brontosaurian insect, but instead saw a silver flitter. Toom
was airborne, supported by a pair of cantilevered wings
powered by an engine attached to the tail keel. The ul-
tralight flitter had no landing gear, and could be walked
about on the ground with wings folded. Hop, skip, and
you were in the air.

She watched Toom cut back and forth, riding the up-
draft off the ridgeline, a shining double star, his wings
catching the slanting rays of the pseudo-sun. Muskrat
wished he had kept the rifle. She bet he could make it
through the misty passes and bag the Red Queen before
they crossed over the ridge. The silver shape darted for-
ward, diving into the mist. Muskrat assumed Toom was
headed for a high pass she could not see, getting guid-
ance from Chou. High and blind was the Sirian’s style.

An audible crunch came over the comnet. Kay-Tee
started hooting and pointing, forgetting she had a speak-
box. A silver wing fluttered out of the clouds, catching
on the cliff face. Horrified by that bright bit of metal.
Muskrat croaked into the comlink, “Chou, Toom is down.”

“Impossible.”

“Check your telemetry.” Chou would trust nothing
that did not come off a screen.

“Damn.”

“You said it.”

A tense two-way talk followed. Chou took the rather
heartless line that telemetry said Toom was dead, and
the Red Queen would benefit from immediate attention.
Everything was going way too swiftly for Muskrat, who
found it hard to just punch “erase” on the obnoxious
Sirian. “You tmst that telemetry link? Look at the bang-
up guidance job it did. Toom is still waiting to hear
about that rock wall.”

“Come get another flitter,” insisted Chou. “It’s still the
best way to hunt for the Queen.” The man was a mono-
maniac.

Muskrat looked at Stray Dog. The Hound pulled back
his lips in a grim smile that meant, “My, how you hu-
mans have messed up.” He started to fool with his com-
link while his speakbox declared flatly, “I am going after
the Red Queen. You and the Hairy Human can find a
flitter.”

“Hold the hunt.” She tried to talk him down. “We

Plague Ship

have serious guidance problems — look what happened
to Toom.”

Stray Dog jacked his speakbox to extra-confident. “You
and Chou can deal with guidance. I am setting my corn-
link to the Red Queen’s frequency, so I can follow her
on my own.”

She shifted from one foot to the other, hating to split
up, but wanting a face-to-face meeting with Chou, who
seemed frightfully casual and businesslike after slam-
ming Toom into a mountain. That was either a terrible
overreaction to Toom’s poor manners, or a really sick
way to reduce the male-to-female ratio. Chou was smart
enough to clean up when he saw the need. Either way,
the man needed a sharp talking-to. Stray Dog did not
worry her so much. He was a survivor type, a moving
target who would not sit in one place like Chou nor
sleep on the job like Toom. So she cut him loose, saying
she would get back to him as soon as she had a flitter.

“Kay-Tee, you come with me.” At least the Chimp
took her seriously.

Stray Dog bounded off before she had finished
speaking, still fiddling with his comlink, trying to get a
fix on the tyrannosaur. Nothing would stop him now
that his hunting instinct had taken charge.

“Shall you lead, Master, or .shall I?” asked Kay-Tee.

“You can lead,” Muskrat shrugged, “as long as you
stop calling me ‘Master.’” Implied choice confu.sed the
SuperChimp, so Muskrat turned the conditional state-
ment into an order: “You lead, but do not call me ‘Mas-
ter.’” Kay-Tee’s constant kowtowing made her nervous.

Kay-Tee still seemed distressed. “Then how should I
address you?”

“Well, ‘Hey, you’ suits most strangers. When we get
to be friends you can call me Muskrat.”

They started off Kay-Tee led her over a low saddle
into the valley beyond. Muskrat was glad to see that the
next valley was nothing like carnivore country; it was
more open, in fact badly overgrazed. She shed her fear
that something was going to leap out of the undergrowth
and make a meal of her. A mixed herd of dinosaurs filled
the valley bottom, blending one into another, their col-
ors mixing as they moved.

From a comfortable distance Muskrat found them
beautiful. She saw more of the horn-faced ceratopsids,
and some equally huge duckbilled hadrosaurs. Dwarfing
them all were big-footed, graceful-necked sauropod.s —
tremendous mountains of moving flesh. Whipping about
between the feet of these titans were fleet little dino-
saurs like two-legged gazelles, taller than Muskrat but
not much heavier.

This Mesozoic version of the Peaceable Kingdom
pleased her. Nothing looked especially threatening, just
oversized — only the giant sequoias kept the landscape
in scale. She saw no sign of the Red Queen, the terrible
tyrannosaur that was supposed to haunt the valley.

Despite the overpopulation, a pair of hadrosaurs
were hard bent on reproducing, humping away like
hands on shore leave in a truly awesome display of
thumping and thrashing. That cheered her. She found
herself humming an ancient air, to a tune that Gordie

had taught her. It was the first time in a long time her
mind had held any music besides Circle of Fire-.

Sighing like the nightwind,
and sobbing like the rain,

Waiting for my lost one
who comes not again . . .

Kay-Tee tapped out a question. “Master Muskrat, I try
my best to obey, but how can we ever be friends?”

Muskrat stopped humming. Her flip offer of friend-
ship must have been bothering Kay-Tee the whole time;
no wonder Toom called them Chumps. “Sure we can be
friends.”

“How, Master?”

“Start by talking about something homey. Do you have
any kids? A mate? If I may be so personal.”

Kay-Tee puzzled over this. “I am too old to have off-
spring, and do not mate much anymore.”

“No one is too old.” Muskrat drew out the small shield-
ed egg-chamber she wore on a chain around her neck.

“I keep my own ovum in this, for when I want children.
Most female vacuum hands have them. Your eggs are
safe from radiation, and you can even get them pre-fer-
tilized. Just pop one in a mechanical womb, and nine
months later you have an offspring or two.”

“And when these offspring need to nurse?”

“They have drugs today that’d make a man lactate.”

Kay-Tee shook her hairy head. “That is for humans.”

“It would work with you,” said Muskrat. “Our genes
are ninety-nine percent alike.”

“Does that make us the same?” The Chimp’s speak-
box expressed polite disbelief.

“No,” said Muskrat, “it makes you a SuperChimp and
me a woman. But under a microviewer my chromosomes
look more like yours than like Chou’s.”

“How is that possible?”

“Because we are both female.”

As she said that, it stmck her hard that Chou was the
only human left in the Ark's original crew. The vims
had come within an angstrom of getting them all.

Dusk was settling by the time they reached the gap
above Carnivore Station. She looked back at the herds
behind her, seeing tremendous light and dark shapes —
striped, dappled, studded with horns and topped with
crests — all crowded together, heading back for the land
bridge. The power and beauty of this moving landscape
made Muskrat proud of her far-off planet. Eons ago Old
Earth had produced these huge creatures, and now a
syndicate of offworlders had parted with planetoids of
credit for one small remnant of her past.

They went through the static fence, past the mins of
Carnivore Station. Muskrat opened the lock and turned
to Kay-Tee. “Go to the flitter hangar and get one prepped.”
She handed the Chimp the needle-gun. “Take this with
you, and make sure the hangar door is on manual.”
Muskrat wanted to know they controlled the lock, and
that there would be no surprises when they needed to
open or close the hangar. The flitter hangar emptied
straight into carnivore country.

R. Garcia y Robertson

Kay-Tee tried to reject the rifle, then seemed pleased
to be ordered about and scooted off toward the hangar.
Attempts at casual conversation must have been a bur-
den on the Chimp’s mind-block.

Alone in the Ark’s cavernous halls, Muskrat consid-
ered calling Chou on the comlink, telling him she was
coming, but by now she was thoroughly sick of elec-
tronic links. Approaching the boat deck she began to
feel better, even light-headed, and dialed herself another
stim shot to clear her brain for conversation. The big
deck was as messy as ever, giving off the faint odor of
decay though the vents were mnning at full, pouring air
out into the corridor.

She called out to Chou, but her voice sounded weak
in the great hollow space beneath the roaring vents. Her
chest hurt, like a brontosaur was kneeing her in the lungs.
She heard a suit alarm ringing, though she was not wear-
ing a suit.

Chou was stretched out across his tatami. Muskrat
staggered to a stop, taking great gulping breaths. Did he
have one stim shot too many? Was he sick? Drunk?

The corpse’s face was gray-green at the edges, eyes
wide, staring out from deep pits of formaldehyde flesh.
His mobile comp terminal sat like the loyal dog by its
fallen master. A single crisp image appeared in Muskrat’s
spinning head: a circle of stupid horned dinosaurs being
cut down one at a time by a bacteria-sized enemy.

Her hands hit the deck first, stopping her from break-
ing her nose. She stared at fat numb fingers spread in
front of her. A sober voice screamed, “Hypoxia!” Turn-
ing slowly, she crawled toward the corridor, the vents
thundering overhead; lying green lights claimed the air
mixture was correct. Leaden arms wanted to lie down,
but the anaerobic odor of death kept her legs moving.
She squirmed into the corridor, panting and terrified.
Unlocking her comlink, she gasped for Stray Dog.

“Greetings, Human. Stray Dog is busy at the moment.
Please leave your ID number. He will be happy to re-
turn your signal.” The Hound had locked his receiver on
the Red Queen’s frequency, so nothing would disturb
his dinosaur hunt.

Muskrat screamed into the comlink anyway. “Record
this: Chou’s dead. The virus got them all. It is in control.
Don’t trust anything that comes over the comlink.” Chou
had lost his computer contest with death. Somehow the
virus got him; cooperating with his circuit-clearing, then
snuffing him like a flame in a vacuum, filling the boat
deck with an odorless inert gas. Muskrat realized that for
some time she must have been chatting with the virus
over the comlink, thinking it was Chou. She wanted to
sit there and be sick, but forced herself to act. There was
a circuit panel by the boat deck entrance. She leaned
against it, flipping switches, blanking circuits. Lights
winked out and vents ceased roaring. The deadly little
program had beaten them so far, but there was still brute
force. No program could block her from using her hands.

She continued to swear and shout into the comlink,

“I am powering everything down. Zero all the circuits;
we have to retreat into the hold.” She had no idea if
Kay-Tee or Stray Dog could even hear her.

One panel down. Now for the flitter hangar, to find
Kay-Tee. Rounding a corner, she really did throw up —
onto a pair of left feet and part of an arm lying on the
deck. The remains of two, possibly three, SuperChimps
were scattered about like bits of bug left by a power
mower.

She wiped her mouth with the back of her hand.
Something with a terribly big appetite was loose in the
corridors, a huge camosaur, maybe more than one. Heart
hammering and head still dizzy, she slipped on the gore,
banging against the bulkhead. Get to the hangar. Toom’s
needle-gun, her needle-gun now, was with Kay-Tee.

Pushing off, she ran for the hangar, pausing only to
slam more switches, forcing herself to take time, bang-
ing the final circuits closed with her fists. Another panel
down. She dashed straight into the hangar, calling for
Kay-Tee. The bay was wide open to the night blackness
of carnivore country.

She stopped, stricken by wide-band terror. Half filling
the hangar was the great gnarled form of the Red Queen.
Jaws and ugly head shone bright crimson under the
hangar lights. Clawed three-toed feet were planted on
either side of Kay-Tee, who stood directly under the di-
nosaur, waving her gun, trying to shoo the enormous
beast out of the hangar. Both Chimp and tyrannosaur
turned to stare, startled by Muskrat’s sudden arrival.

Kay-Tee reacted first, holding out the rifle. “Master
Muskrat, here is your needle-gun.” Her speakbox sound-
ed absurdly calm.

“Just shoot!” yelled Muskrat.

“Master Chou told me not to fire,” the mechanical
voice explained.

“Chou’s dead. Fire, damn you!”

The mind-blocked Chimp hesitated, caught between
conflicting human orders. The Red Queen seemed less
confused. Her head snapped down and rows of saw-
edged teeth closed about Kay-Tee’s middle. Twisting
about, trying to fire, the Chimp was lifted into the air.
The monster bit down harder, using a shearing action.
Kay-Tee’s shot went wild, clanging off the ceiling.

Horrified, Muskrat saw the tyrannosaur’s head go
back and gulp. Kay-Tee dropped the rifle. Head, shoul-
ders, and a single leg hung from the great jaws. Kay-
Tee’s mouth opened, hooting something. Another gulp
and Kay-Tee was gone, except for the dangling leg
which dropped next to the rifle on the deck.

Human and dinosaur stood alone in the hangar.

Too stricken to turn and run. Muskrat slipped down
to her knees. The needle-gun was lying on the deck
next to Kay-Tee’s sawn-off leg. Above it hung the knob-
by head, nostrils flared, eyes peering from under bony
ridges, looking strangely curious. Perhaps the monster
was confused by meals that came running to her.

“Do not press panic,” Muskrat told herself. “Every-
thing will be all right.” She edged toward the needle-
gun. Yellow eyes studied her movements. She knew the
Red Queen had a brain as big as hers, but what could
Mesozoic monster really know about people and guns?

Still hungry after a SuperChimp or three? Muskrat
stretched herself full out on the deck. “Take it easy, old

Plague Ship

girl,” she said aloud, talking to herself and the tyran-
nosaur. Her hand closed around the stock of the rifle.

The hideous head bobbed down, dripping with
blood. Muskrat rolled sideways, holding in a hysterical
scream. In complete shock she watched the big carno-
saur scoop up Kay-Tee’s stray leg. Cheeks bulging as
she chewed and swallowed, the Red Queen gave her a
suspicious look, like Muskrat had been trying to snatch
carrion from between chisel-edged fangs.

Rising to one knee, suppressing hysterical giggles,
she shouldered her rifle, sighting straight into the belly
of the beast. No way to miss. Only real danger was hav-
ing the dinosaur fall on top of her. Her finger found the
firing stud.

The charge. Her sweating finger gripped the stud, but
did not squeeze. Kay-Tee had fired; so this was the sec-
ond shot, set for full charge. Fire now, and a megacredit
dinosaur was going to be dead meat.

“Shoot, shoot,” chanted the reptilian back of her brain,
but pressing the firing stud was one more win for the
virus that had snuffed Chou, Gordie, and the others. The
hangar had been left open, baited with Chimps, just to
pit this carnivore against her. More damage was done
no matter who won. Every gram of feeling rested in her
fingertip as she stared into the creature’s ugly, carnivo-
rous face. The only adult survivor of the Cretaceous ex-
tinction stared back at her.

Forcing her finger off the firing stud, she eased the ri-
fle down to her hip, gaze fixed on the carnosaur’s jaws.
The Red Queen cocked her head, following each of
Muskrat’s movements. “Be a good little horror,” Muskrat
muttered. “If you give me a minute, I will do both of us
a favor.” She pumped the gun. With a horrid click the
charge in the chamber came flying out.

Down came the great jaws, rows of sabre points
snapping at the sound and movement. Muskrat
squealed. Her free hand hobbled the ejecting charge,
sending it skittering across the hangar deck. She dived
for it, rolling fast, just ahead of the teeth.

Slamming into the bulkhead, she trapped the charge
with her body, then tried to burrow into the angle where
the wall met the deck. The tyrannosaur’s snout bumped
against the bulkhead above her, and the Red Queen
reared back, a disturbed look on her face, as though
Muskrat were not worth all the trouble she was causing.

She fished the charge out from under her. Sobbing,
steadying herself, she drew the charge down, seeing
nothing but the notches, then she brought the rifle back
around slowly, slipping the charge into the chamber.

The plastic made another booming click.

The jaws lunged. Muskrat rammed the rifle right into
the open mouth. The Red Queen recoiled with the bar-
rel lodged in her teeth, jerking Muskrat’s finger off the
firing stud. There was a short tug of war. The twelve-
ton, thirteen-meter tyrannosaur won.

Biting down, the Red Queen gave her another dis-
turbed look, and began to spit out plastic rifle parts.

Muskrat crawled deeper into her corner. The terrible
carnivore stepped after her, jaws opening again. Horror
melted away. Hopeless calm took control. A lying voice

in her head said, “You are going to be all right some-
how. This could never happen, not in real life.”

The Red Queen cocked her head, as though she too
could hear that voice. Then, in stately low-gee motion,
the massive carnosaur leaned forward, collapsing, slid-
ing down toward the deck. Muskrat leaped away to
keep from being crushed as the big beast flattened out.

Staring at the still form, relief flooded over her, mak-
ing Muskrat feel so light she thought for a moment the
Ark had stopped spinning. Stray Dog came striding up
the sleeping Queen’s spine, needle-gun under his arm,
looking tremendously pleased. He retrieved Muskrat’s
broken and twisted weapon, punched with tooth marks,
the barrel completely shattered. Looking it over, he gave
his head a slow, exaggerated shake. “You would have
saved yourself a lot of worry if you had got off a shot.”

“I stopped to set the charge,” she said in a shocked
whisper, as much to herself as him. Her body felt emp-
ty, hollow as the Ark of Halcyon.

“Stopped to set the charge? Are humans born brain-
damaged, or is it acquired with age?”

She stalked over and jerked Stray Dog’s charge out of
the Red Queen’s hind end. It was set at twelve tons. She
waved the probe in his face. “You set yours.”

Stray Dog flipped his speakbox from “disdain” to
“patient instruction”: “I had all the time I needed. She
was not about to bite down on me.” He gave his muzzle
another slow, solemn shake. “And you know, Chou was
way off. The Red Queen was not in herbivore country at
all. Imagine my surprise when I tracked her here.”

“Imagine mine,” said Muskrat, shaking off her shock
and emptiness. “Chou is dead. We have to close down
Housekeeping and get back to the Hiyo. The drive unit
can find Alpha C by dead reckoning. Centauri System is
a tenth of a light-year across; it can hardly miss it.”

“And leave all these lovable dinosaurs and Hairy Hu-
mans?”

“We can follow them in, and have the Hiyo wake us
if we’re needed.” She hoped to heaven they would not
be.

Going from panel to panel, they shut down every cir-
cuit. Warning alarms sounded. Familiar voices came
over the comlink — ^Toom’s, Chou’s, even Gordie’s — ca-
joling, threatening, pleading with them to cease. They
finished up their work using hand lamps, making sure
there was not an erg of energy left in Housekeeping.
Muskrat would have smashed the circuits if she could,
destroying every trace of the virus.

Back in the Hiyo Maru’s cramped cabin. Stray Dog
reviewed his speakbox’s memory. Coming upon her
message, he played it back for both of them. “You told
me over the comlink to ignore everything that came
over the comlink?”

Muskrat shrugged, saying she supposed so. It was
plainly her voice, high-pitched and panic-stricken.

“That is a self-negating absurdity. Humans have less
logic than blue-green algae.”

“I had a hard day.” She lay back in her acceleration
couch, hoping she would emerge from Sleep in Centauri
System having forgotten she was ever awake.

R. Garcia y Robertson

Logos:

My Tale Is Read

Rob Chilson

Hugh Hesseltine paused to re-
move his hat and wipe his
brow, looking at the lilacs
creeping up the trellis in front
of the Wheat and Sickle. “Odd,
that,” he said aloud. But then,
this was Langdon, a village
where he’d never been before.
Likely, many things were dif-
ferent here, so far away from
everything. He was all of three
days’ walk from Little Midling.

Dismissing the puzzle of
the creeping lilacs temporarily
from his mind, Hugh stepped
to the door of the tavern. It
was open, and he looked in
and immediately recognized
Sir Stanleigh Storm from the
books. There could be no mis-
take: his black-and-white
checked cloth cap, pointed
fore and aft, lay on the table,
and the famous shoulder-
cloaked black coat was thrown
over the back of a chair. He
was smoking his briar, medita-
tively reading a book; a half-
empty stein sat before him.
Even as Hugh stared, he
groped expertly for the stein
and lifted it for a drink.

In the Wheat and Sickle
they visibly had no idea who
sat at one of their tables, doubt-
less waiting for food. Mine
hostess bustled about, and a
girl desultorily washed and
dried glasses behind the bar.

Hugh received a jolt. The
famous eagle eyes of Sir Stan-

lllustration by Hannah M. G. Shapero

leigh had focused on him over the brim of the stein. Im-
mediately Sir Stanleigh lowered the heavy glass and
looked Hugh sternly over from head to foot, swallowing
his sip, Sir Stanleigh’s frowning gaze returned to Hugh’s
face with a puzzled, indeed with a slightly befuddled look.

Even Sir Stanleigh might be forgiven a dubious glance
at his stein, though it was obviously the first he’d had that
afternoon, and an even more dubious glance at the book,
which Hugh thought to recognize: one of R, Chilson’s,

“I am not one to cavil at impossibilities,” said Sir Stan-
leigh to Hugh, rising, “Hugh Hesseltine of Little Midling,

I believe? There cannot be two who wear slouch hats
such as that — lovely feather, sir — or pantaloons of that
cut. A hot day for walking. I perceive that you have
been several days upon the valley road.”

Coming out of his daze, Hugh stepped over the
threshold and bowed bemusedly. So this is what it feels
like to step into a book, he thought. “And you can’t be
none but Sir Stanleigh Storm, the great detective. Your
clobber and your self are also one of a kind.”

Sir Stanleigh glanced in some surprise at his cap and
coat, as if seeing for the first time just how distinctive
they were. Hugh supposed the other was as surprised as
he at having his rather workaday garb called distinctive.

“Ma-rye-uh! Maria!” called the hostess. “Another
gennleman! See to ’im, lamb.”

“My dear sir,” said Sir Stanleigh after a moment. He
spoke with some emotion. “It is a great pleasure, and a
great surprise, to meet you here in Langdon. Mr. Hessel-
tine, I have long been an admirer of yours; but I thought
you purely fictional.” He took a pull on his pipe, look-
ing questioningly at Hugh.

Hugh walked up to the table and reached out his
hand. Sir Stanleigh clasped it firmly. “I’m as surprised as
you,” he said. “Doubted you was solid. Sir Stanleigh. Fact
is, I’m a great reader m’self, and I’ve always admired
your adventures.”

Sir Stanleigh said “Haw!” as he released a puff of
smoke. “So each of us is fictional to the other. And yet,
here we are.”

Maria came to the table, flourishing a dirty cloth.
“What’s the gennleman’s desires?” she asked tiredly.

Hugh cocked an eye at the stein. “How’s the ale?”

“Capital; couldn’t be bitter,” said Sir Stanleigh. “Haw!”

Hugh looked at him for a moment, then got the joke
on better, and smiled. “Ale, then. Shepherd’s pie, or
steak-and-kidney, whichever you’ve got, ducks.”

When she had gone Hugh sat down comfortably,
tossing the jacket he’d been carrying onto the fourth
chair at the table and dropping his slouch hat on it.
“Odd, this,” he said, and that reminded him of the lilacs
out front. “Did you see them creeping lilacs? Elf magic,
likely. Langdon’s a strange place, on the face of it.”

“Indeed,” said Sir Stanleigh, puffing on his pipe again.
“There are metaphysical connotations here that disturb me.”

That was the kind of thing Sir Stanleigh would say
that caused Hugh’s brow to wrinkle when he was read-
ing Chilson. Usually it was explained, but here, there
was no one to explain Sir Stanleigh but Sir Stanleigh.
Feeling like a great gump, he said, “You mean the lilacs?”

A sharp glance from the eagle eyes. “The lilacs I take
to be indicative only,” he said. (“Ah,” said Hugh.) “The
greater problem lies in the nature of the universe. See here,
Mr. Hesseltine. Let us say that I, Sir Stanleigh Storm, am
reading a book by R. Chilson. While doing so, I am imag-
ining the whole world and everything in it, including you.”

“Ah,” cried Hugh in excitement. “I’m in Chilson too?”

Sir Stanleigh was ^4ery quick on the uptake, just as Chil-
son had always said. “Indeed, your adventures are his best
books. And I take it that you read of me in Chilson also?”

“Yes! Only them’s his best books.”

“I thank you; I think we both have reason to be proud.”
Sir Stanleigh smiled, and glanced up as Maria appeared
tiredly with Hugh’s stein. When she had gone, Sir Stan-
leigh waited politely till Hugh had taken the edge off his
thirst, and continued. “When I am reading about you, I
imagine you and your world. And when you read about
me, you imagine me, giving me and my world reality in
your mind. But, Mr. Hesseltine, neither of us is reading
of the other at this moment.” He indicated the book on
the table. “This is a Gaharionath story in any case.”

Hugh though he’d recognized the book. “You mean,”
he said, feeling a creeping chill, “we’re only real when
someone’s readin’ about us?”

“If we are both characters in books, it must be so,”
said Sir Stanleigh. He emptied his stein and set it down,
too well bred to expel his breath. With a lift of his finger
he signaled Maria again. “The question is, who is read-
ing about us at this moment?”

Hugh pondered that for a moment. “Don’t make
much difference, do it? Must be thousands of people
reading Chilson. What gets me is, him puttin’ us in the
same book. I don’t know as I like that. Them kinds of
books don’t usually work too well.”

“It’s the only way we could meet,” said Sir Stanleigh.
“But I am forced to agree, though I trust that one so re-
doubtable as R. Chilson will not fall into any of the ob-
vious auctorial pitfalls.”

Tired as she seemed to be, Maria was prompt enough
with the ale, and had the wit to bring two.

When he had finished his first and tasted the second,
Hugh got back to what struck him as the cardinal point.
He said, “Let’s take another look at them lilacs. I didn’t
but give ’em the once-over as I come by.”

“No better starting point suggests itself to me,” said
Sir Stanleigh.

With looks of mutual respect the men rose. Sir Stan-
leigh fetching his black coat with its cape. Outside they
stared in astonishment at the trellis. It was now covered
with creeping lilies.

“Spider lilies,” said Hugh wonderingly.

“Hmmm,” said Sir Stanleigh. They approached the
trellis cautiously, and Hugh sniffed the air.

“Still a smell of lilac in the air,” he said.

Sir Stanleigh sniffed apologetically. “I’ve been smoking
and don’t detect it. However, your powers of observation,
Mr. Hesseltine, are justly famous. Faint scent of lilac in the
air, and of course these lilies have no great odor. So un-
til moments ago, there were indeed lilacs on this trellis.”

“Don’t sound much like elf magic,” said Hugh. He

Rob Chilson

poked at the vines. “Hey! Them’s rose vines. Rose vines
with lilies on ‘em.”

“Yes, I had observed. I suppose if one wishes to
make climbing flowers, as it might be lilacs, one should
start with a climbing vine. You observe, of course, that
these are not domesticated but wild rose vines.”

Hugh frowned at the vines. Then he saw what Sir
Stanleigh meant. There were twice as many thorns as on
tame rose bushes, and they were straight. Had a more
businesslike air, too. Looked uncommonly like cactus
thorns. But that was standard for wild rose, of course.

Sir Stanleigh produced his famous folding lens and ex-
amined the lily blooms minutely, as Chilson would say,
but observed nothing significant, as his grunt conveyed.
Snapping the lens shut and replacing it in his coat pock-
et, he looked frowningly at Hugh, as puzzled as he.

Around them was the blandest of normality. Cocks
crowed, birds chirruped, village voices called. Some-
where a boy sang a song whose chorus was, “Tell me a
story, tell me a story,” in an irritating falsetto. Hooves
clopped in the road, and a calf bellowed in the distance.

A loud clatter drew their attention to the street. A car-
rier’s waggon had pulled up before the inn, and a short,
slender, bewildered man fell off. Hugh hadn’t seen the
beginning of this movement, but he suspected that the
other had intended to descend normally but had become
distracted by something in the landscape and ceased to
pay attention to what his hands and feet were doing.
They had immediately become entangled in the wheel
he was descending.

As the fellow, still lying in the dust of the street, was
directing a glare of wild incredulity equally at him and
his companion, Hugh supposed it must be they who had
caused his fall. He shared a glance with Sir Stanleigh. The
eagle eyes were inscrutable, but Hugh knew that the in-
scrutability covered puzzlement as acute as his own.

“Pardon me, sir; may I help you?” Sir Stanleigh said.
The two stepped forward, Hugh as helpful and curious
as the detective.

“Er — no, thank you. Sir Stanleigh,” said the stranger,
arising nimbly enough and knocking the dust of the
road from his hands. He seemed young, but his hair was
thinning and receding. “Thanks anyway, S-sir Stanleigh,
Hugh — er — Mr. Hesseltine.”

Hugh frowned, not recognizing the fellow. He was
wearing curious clothes, blue pants and violet knit shirt
with a collar, both cut very close to his body. “You got
the advantage of us, mate,” he said.

The stranger’s mouth opened and closed as he looked
from one to the other; he did not seem to notice the
carrier’s box brushing him as the other lugged it into the
inn. Closing his eyes, he said, with an air of one who
expects to be disbelieved, “My name is Chilson.”

The eagle eyes stared for one astonished moment into
Hugh’s own wide peepers. “R. Chilson?” Sir Stanleigh
demanded.

“The same,” said the stranger faintly. He cleared his
throat. “Rob.”

“The same R. Chilson as wrote all them books?” Hugh
said.

“"Well — er — I’ve written a number of books,” said the
stranger apologetically.

“Then how can you be in this book that you’re writin’,
eh? Tell me that!” Hugh said triumphantly.

“Oh, I make no difficulty of that, Mr. Hesseltine,” said
Sir Stanleigh. “Authors often write themselves into their
books. Tell us, Mr. Chilson, just what is going on here.
"Why are two of the more notable adventurers in your
books brought together?”

“Er — I’m sorry, gentlemen.” Chilson spread his hands
helplessly. “I have no idea.”

“No idea!” said Sir Stanleigh frostily. “How can you
have no idea, sir? This is your book, is it not?”

“Well ... I suppose it must be. Nobody else would
write about you two. But really. I’m not writing this book.
I’m just one of the characters in it.”

Hugh’s head began to ache; he looked at Sir Stan-
leigh, who looked uncertainly back. “You’re the writer
of the book,” Hugh said, getting it straight, “and you’re a
character in it. And yet you don’t know nothing about it.”

“No more than you, gentlemen.” He looked around
nervously at the placid village street. Somewhere the
small boy still sang his monotonous song. Tell me a sto-
ry, tell me a story. “I’ve never been in a place like this.
I’m from a different world.”

That’s right, Hugh thought. Sir Stanleigh existed in a
world whose features were not to be found on any map
in Hugh’s world.

“A different world,” Sir Stanleigh mused. “A different
Word, ha! ‘In the beginning was the Word.’ Logos, in
the Greek.” He looked sharply at the stranger. “How did
you come to be here, sir?”

“Well, I’m not sure,” said Chilson unhappily. “I have
only vague memories of . . . before. I think I was writ-
ing, and I have a feeling that I was drowsy. Maybe
about to doze off in my chair. Then I gave a sort of
start, because I was sitting under a big tree. I stood up
and wandered around in shock for a bit, in the middle
of the Dubious Forest, on the side of the road from Oc-
tober Vale. At first I was afraid it was Micklewood. Pres-
ently the carrier came along and offered to convey me
to Langdon for three copper pennies. So here I am.” The
poor chap still looked to be a bit under the weather.

“Hmm,” said Hugh. He’d been overcharged. “So you’re
not even writing the book, exactly; more like dreamin’ it.”

“Writers do a lot of dreaming,” Chilson said apologet-
ically. “Sometimes when they’re asleep, more often
when they’re awake. All good books are dreamed up.”

“But when you wake up, back there where you came
from, you’ll disappear from the book? From — Langdon?”
Sir Stanleigh asked.

“I don’t think so; do you? I mean, a bad writer some-
times forgets about a character and stops writing about
him. Or a writer will go back and take a character out of
a book. But characters don’t just vanish without good
reason. Remember,” he said, and he looked haunted at
the thought, “I’m part of this book now, even if I am
writing . . . somewhere else.”

“So there’s two R. Chilsons, “ said Hugh. “One that’s
writing the book and one that’s in it.” He’d never read a

Logos; My Tale Is Read

book before where the author had put himself into it;
but then, he wasn’t reading this book. And if any writer
could and would do such a thing, it would be R. Chilson.

Who still looked pretty rocky.

“Step into the Wheat and Sickle here and have a drop,”
said Hugh. “You could do with a bit of something
stronger than ale. I’m thinking.”

“Good thinking,” said Sir Stanleigh. “And while we’re
out, you might give us your thoughts on this trellis of
climbing lilies growing on wild rose vines. They were
lilacs — ” He and Hugh stared in astonishment. The trellis
was covered again by creeping lilacs, their odor heavy
in the air. “ — just now,” Sir Stanleigh finished weakly.

Chilson paused uncertainly before the trellis, clearly
more interested in the cool interior of the tavern. Hugh
explained the changeable flowers to him, trying to con-
vey the puzzlement he and Sir Stanleigh felt. The writer
was not impressed.

“He’s — I’m — still writing the book, and still changing
things around.” Chilson shmgged.

“But why climbing lilacs — or lilies?” Sir Stanleigh said
in exasperation.

Again Chilson shrugged. “Local color; something to
make the setting exotic. And maybe a private joke on
the readers, half of whom will read so quickly or care-
lessly they won’t even notice.”

Hugh began to wonder how much he had missed in
reading R. Chilson, and became a bit miffed. He saw
that Sir Stanleigh shared his feeling.

“Let’s have that drink,” said the famous detective stiffly.

R. Chilson didn’t seem to enjoy his ale as much as he
might’ve, but when the thoughtful Maria served up three
servings of shepherd’s pie, he dug in gratefully, doubt-
less not having eaten since that morning. They became
fairly comfortable over the smoking pie, but the great
writer was definitely subdued, and under the weather.

“I make no doubt, Mr. Hesseltine, that we have here
with us the tme hero of this book. Eh?”

Hugh nodded; it seemed reasonable. “Can’t think of
any other reason a man’d write himself into a book,” he
said.

“Oh, well, sometimes writers put themselves in as mi-
nor characters who sort of comment on the story,” said
Chilson hastily.

“Not much point in that, not if you’re dreaming the
book up, like,” said Hugh. “No, I take it there’s an ad-
venture hereabouts, and we’re all brought together for it.”

“An excellent suggestion,” said Sir Stanleigh. He en-
quired of Maria if there was any trouble or danger in the
town, criminals at large, that kind of thing.

Mildly wondering, she said, “No, naught but the dire
beast as ate Will Honeycutt’s pigses.”

“Dire beast? Come, this is most gratifying,” said Sir
Stanleigh, rubbing his hands together, his eyes gleaming.

“Outen the Dubious Forest,” Maria explained. “Was
there anything more, sir? Right.”

Chilson looked even more dubious than the forest.
“What are these dire beasts like?”

“Don’t know yet,” said Hugh. “I’ve read all your
books, Mr. C., and you’ve never mentioned ’em before.

But you’re a very fanciful writer — eh. Sir Stanleigh? — so I
expect they’re something to see!”

“Quite,” said Sir Stanleigh. “Pity I didn’t think to slip
my Watson .39 into my pocket, but I was on a holiday
excursion. You’ll have to dispatch the brute with spear
and sword.”

“Aye,” said Hugh. “No doubt mine host can lend us
the wherewithal.”

Mine host was not within, but the hostess, though
rather surprised at this desire to go forth to battle, was
not unhelpful. She produced an old sword and long
knife from over the mantle in the snuggery. Setting the
hostler’s boy to sharpening them, she remarked that
there was a ten-foot spear on the rafters of the shed,
wrapped in oiled cloth.

“That’s all very well,” said Sir Stanleigh. “But how
about a bit of armor, eh?”

There was none to be had, but Hugh had always had
to make do with the materials at hand and suggested the
scullery. And indeed, he immediately lighted upon a small
three-toed iron pot of just a suitable size to fit over the
great author’s head.

“We can tie a plume to the legs, and handles’ll serve to
fasten it on,” he said, and rove his handkerchief through
them and under R. Chilson’s chin.

“You realize I’ve never used a spear, sword, or knife
in my life,” said R. Chilson worriedly.

“Not to fear; no doubt the you that’s writin’ this ad-
venture will think of everything,” said Hugh soothingly.

The author grunted and stared out into the back yard
while he and Sir Stanleigh and the hostess conferred
about body armor. Out there, a small red-headed boy
pounded sticks into the soft ground with his father’s
hammer, singing a song whose chorus was: “Tell me a
story, tell me a story, remember what you said.”

“Carpeting!” said Sir Stanleigh. “Capital! Two of those
small throw rugs rolled up and draped over his shoul-
ders will protect him from most blows.”

“We’ll belt the ends of ’em around his waist,” said
Hugh practically. “But how about his arms and legs?”

“Leave the arms bare for the sake of motion. The
legs? Hmm.”

“Mebbe more carpets?” Hugh asked.

Mine hostess went to fetch them. Outside, the boy’s
song went on: it was a small boy who bedeviled his
busy father for a story at every turn. Finally one night,
as the harried father returned from birthing lambs after
midnight, the boy sprang out with his eternal chorus of,
“Tell me a story.”

Hugh and Sir Stanleigh commenced rolling up the
mgs, while outside, the maddened father said, “I’ll tell
you a tale you’ll never forget,” and the boy cried,

“Ouch! My tail is red!”

The hero of the book seemed decidedly glum as they
sought to insert his legs into the carpet rolls. “Cheer up,
it won’t be so bad as all that,” cried Hugh, clapping him
on the back between the mgs. “It could be a lot worse
nor this. Why, you could’ve arranged to have yourself
crucified.”

Rob Chilson

The Number
of the Sand

George Zebrowski

There are those who believe
not only in the infinity of
number but in actual infinity,
and others who deny it, yet
claim that the number of the
sand cannot be said because it
is too large.

— Archimedes

Hannibal dismounts and walks
out into the center of the val-
ley of Zama, followed only by
his interpreter, a trusted veter-
an of the Italian campaign.
Scipio also approaches with
only an interpreter. At each
general’s back, unseen armies
wait in the hot Tunisian after-

illustration by Laura and John Lakey

noon. The two leaders stop half a dozen steps apart and
regard each other in silence.

Hannibal is the taller and older figure, with a sun-
burned face half-covered with a cloth that hides his
graying hair. He turns his head slightly to benefit his
good eye.

Scipio seems tense as he stands bareheaded, holding
his helmet, but his expression is that of a proud, hand-
some man. There is gold inlay on his breastplate, but no
other mark of Roman military rank.

“Do you prefer Latin or Greek?” Hannibal asks in
Greek. “I know of your interest in the Hellenes.”

“It is one of your loves also,” Scipio replies. “I’ve
heard that you write in Greek.”

Both men glance at their interpreters, then return their
attention to each other.

“They will only witness our discussion,” Scipio says.
“Neither of us needs the delay of having our words re-
peated.”

Hannibal nods at this sign of respect, then stands
straighter and shifts his weight to his right leg. “Luck has
been with you. Consul,” he says, “but we both know
that good fortune cannot continue unbroken.”

Scipio draws a deep breath and says, “Fortune had
little to do with the fact that you were compelled by ob-
vious necessity, and your own honorable character, to
leave Italy and come to the defense of your native city.
All wars must aim at a truer peace.”

Hannibal smiles. “Why be modest? The necessity was
of your making, and might have been otherwise.” He
pauses and waits for a reply, but Scipio waits longer, and
Hannibal at last says, “You and I seem to be the only
ones who understand that war should be a way to a
more lasting peace. Our peoples will only benefit if we
end our conflict here and now.”

“What do you offer?” Scipio asks.

“The islands,” Hannibal says, “even the smaller ones,
such as the Malta group, between Italy and Africa. Car-
thage will also give up Spain.”

“But this is less,” Scipio replies, “than the terms of the
armistice already signed in Rome.”

“Which you drafted,” Hannibal says quickly, “whether
signed by your government or not.”

“You offer us our own terms,” Scipio counters, “but
without the surrender of war vessels or the return of de-
serters and fugitives in your ranks.” The Roman general
raises a hand. “I know that they make up the majority of
the army with which you fled Italy, and I realize that
you will not betray your veterans, but I cannot accept
less than Rome’s original terms.”

Hannibal sighs and nods. “I knew there was no pos-
sibility of peace between us, but I wished to meet you,
and I do not regret it. We will have to attempt to destroy
each other’s force. Neither of us can shirk that duty.”

The two men gaze at each other for a long, frozen mo-
ment, then make gestures of salute and turn away. . . .

A sea of simmering noise swallowed the scene at Zama.
The historian ended his first observation of the meeting
between Scipio and Hannibal in North Africa, near Car-

thage in the year 202 B.C., as the first step in his New
Study of History. Any randomly selected coordinate of
any linear history would have served as well.

As the Prolegomena to his study, he had sampled nu-
merous studies of history, observing how oral narratives
gave way to the art of writing down a connected chroni-
cle from surviving documents. This crude form of histo-
ry was constructed not from a continuous flow of events,
but from available, discontinuous samples; from these
moments, no one could reconstruct any one tme past,
and the result was always biased toward the concerns of
the investigating present.

When the first linear history machines became opera-
tional, the interpretive art of the old historians collapsed,
as the whole linear range of human time could now be
observed at any desired speed. The old studies of histo-
ry were replaced by a half-million-year literal record,
which could be observed at any point along its mean-
dering course.

After nearly a century, despite the efforts of interpre-
tive observers, the past became the dead past, because
nothing usable could be learned from it beyond curious
fact. As the old problems of history were setded, the
world nished toward a future event horizon of incom-
prehensibility, on the other side of which waited a cul-
ture so changed in its biology and goals that little of his-
tory would have any meaning for it.

Even when the cliometricon uncovered quantum his-
tory, access to the infinity of historical variants only con-
tinued to lessen the importance of history in human af-
fairs. Everything had happened and was going to happen;
no lesson that could be extracted from the past had any
meaning to an accelerating history. All previously false
histories of the past became true in some world. Lessons
could be applied, imperfectly, to restricted sequences of
human experience, in which the time of one generation
and the next was essentially unchanged; but to be led
by the past in a quickening time would shackle the fu-
ture, if it could even be done. The universe was not a
closed, self-consistent system; it was open, unfinished,
and infinite in all directions, including time. Its true na-
ture was mirrored in the incompleteness of both natural
and mathematical languages, and in the failure of hu-
man law to keep up with emergent circumstances.

The cliometricon’s ability to retrieve decaying, fading
information from the cosmic background had extended
the history machine’s capabilities, but without any clear
advantage for humanity beyond the satisfaction of schol-
arly curiosity. Meanwhile, the history machine’s ability to
show the past, even the immediate, fleeing past mea-
sured in seconds and minutes, made possible the emer-
gence, after a stormy transition, of the first panoptic hu-
man culture. This transition included the so-callecl privacy
wars, and led to the acceptance of peeping as the right
of every human being. Since there was no way to blind
the all-seeing eye, humankind had simply faced up to
the fact of peeping with a new social stability based on
informational nakedness, in which everyone was re-
warded. The price of peeping was to be peeped. For
the first time in its history, humankind revealed itself to

George Zebrowski

itself in a systematic way, settling many questions of in-
dividuality and human nature. Past humanity had only
glimpsed itself through its poetries, fictions, and visual
dramas; but now all curiosities were satisfied, and the
result was greater understanding and compassion for
some, and boredom for others,

Cliometricians continued to pursue greater issues,
even though they routinely used linear history machines
to verify the priority of their colleagues’ areas of interest,
personal as well as professional, and avoided poaching
on all staked claims. But the profession always avoided
facing up to the question of its legitimacy, which seemed
irresolvable.

There could be no complete history of histories. Events
ran to infinity in all directions, diverging at every mo-
ment, at every fraction of a moment, at every point in
each variant of space-time. Yet this process always meant
something to the interiors that were intelligent entities;
even when it seemed to make no sense, meaning was
felt. The cliometrician watched the embarrassment of the
old historians as they were confronted with the living
past — and their denials as they drowned in the ocean of
truth, claiming that it was all a simulation constmcted
from massed data by imaging programs. They could not
accept that human history was one of the masks of
chaos, behind which there was nothing.

In the first hour of horizon light, a sleepless Hannibal
watches from a hillock as the elephants stir and begin to
advance. Behind them are Mago’s men — silent Ligurians,
complaining Gauls, wild Moors, and a small group of
Spaniards. Well drilled, heavily armed, and battle-wise,
the men advance shoulder to shoulder. A second force
of Carthaginian recruits, led by the aging Hanno, ad-
vances behind the elephants, followed by the third force,
Hannibal’s veterans, the army of Bruttium, which delib-
erately lags behind, and is all but invisible to the Romans
in the gray morning light.

Only Hannibal and his waiting messengers know why
this is not his usual long battle line. If all goes according
to plan, three separate battles will be fought at Zama.

But despite the starlit start of his first force, Hannibal
sees that the Roman force is already moving across the
valley, its standards a slow-moving fence, flanked by
horsemen. Three ranks of machinelike infantry — front,
spearmen, and supporting legions of triarii — come for-
ward. There are puzzling breaks in the line, which are
defended by only a few javelin throwers.

As the armies collide in the same place where Scipio
and Hannibal had met, the Roman horns and trumpets
cry out, startling Hannibal’s elephants. Many of the beasts
panic and rush into the openings in the Roman lines,
where they are greeted with swarms of missiles and
herded through the lines to the rear. Confused, the re-
maining elephants turn and charge the Carthaginian cav-
alry. Scipio’s mounted force scatters Hannibal’s horse-
men. They stmggle to regroup and fight, but are too few
for Laelius’s and Masinissa’s squadrons. The massed rid-
ers move off as a single storm, out of sight.

Hannibal watches as Mago’s Gauls and Ligurians lock

man to man with the first Roman line and bring it to a
stop; but the triarii slip through the openings, and the
Roman line surges forward again. The second wave,
Carthaginian recruits from the city itself, fails to relieve
Mago’s force, because Hannibal has ordered his three
forces to keep apart. The survivors of the first wave re-
treat and turn with rage on the Carthaginian recmits, who
push them back as the Roman line drops its spears and
javelins and advances with shields and swords, support-
ed by second-rank spearmen.

Desperately, the Carthaginians hold back the legions,
but by late morning the last of Hannibal’s two forces
breaks to the sides of the valley, leaving the ground
strewn with the dead and dying.

On his hillock, Hannibal knows that he must now
send in his third force, the ten thousand veterans of Italy,
who stand waiting for the moment when Scipio can no
longer retreat, while on either side the survivors of the
first two waves regroup.

Trumpets command the Romans to remove their
wounded, recover weapons, and clear away debris. The
standards still fly as the men drink water and rest.

Then, in response to swift new orders from Scipio,
the three lines reform. Spearmen move off to one flank
of the front line, the triarii take the other. The Roman
line lengthens far beyond Hannibal’s, and closes in on
the weak Carthaginian flanks. The armies are equally
matched now, except that Hannibal’s veterans are fresh,
and they have never known defeat at the hands of the
Romans.

Suddenly the Roman cavalry returns — and charges
into the rear of Hannibal’s veterans. There is no Cartha-
ginian cavalry left to stop them. The army of Italy is
caught between the infantry and horsemen. The Brut-
tians turn to defend their flanks and rear.

They fight and die across the afternoon, until nearly
all are killed. Hannibal sends a message to Carthage,
counseling acceptance of all surrender terms, and with a
few survivors flees eastward.

The historian returned to the first meeting between Sci-
pio and Hannibal, and listened again to their great-
souled but hopeless words. Then he crossed the lines,
watching the variations.

A servile Hannibal admitted his crimes against Rome
to a pompous Scipio, mouthing the words of Livy’s his-
tory, which was true here and a lie elsewhen. The Tu-
nisian landscape seemed frozen. Grains of sand hung
suspended in the air at Zama. Hannibal’s headcloth dis-
appeared. He wore a patch over one eye. He became
stooped, then stood taller and lost an arm. Scipio ap-
peared, now wearing his helmet. Insignias of rank ap-
peared on his breastplate. The two leaders spoke only
through their interpreters, who seemed changeless. The
view-tank flashed as the historian paused. Scipio and
Hannibal were conversing from horseback.

“They hate me back in Rome,” Scipio says in Greek,
“and that hate will only increase if I defeat you here,
There are those who fear my success.”

Hannibal smiles and says, “I, too, am disappointed

The Number of the Sand

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with the city I left behind as a boy. The fat rich mle it
for their sons and daughters. Honor is dead.”

“You might restore it,” Scipio answers, “if you became
its just ruler.”

Hannibal laughs. “Your Senate will not tolerate a Car-
thage with me at its head!”

“But it might not fear a Carthage without you,” Scipio
answers.

Hannibal considers, then says, “You and I will not
fight, then. Will you give me your word that Carthage
will not burn?”

Scipio nods. The two men clasp arms, then turn and
ride away.

The historian cut across the variants and found Han-
nibal alone again, looking out across the empty valley of
Zama, where there had been no battle. Was Hannibal
thinking of how he could have won? Was this aging sol-
dier still in love with the craft of battle as he rode away,
hoping for peace?

But in this variant Rome betrays Scipio, replaces him
as commander of its forces in Africa, and burns Carthage
to the ground. Scipio commits suicide. In Bithynia, far to
the east, Hannibal receives the double news with sor-
row, and drinks poison in the garden of his house as
Roman soldiers approach. A servant flees north with
Hannibal’s memoirs, forgetting the last piece of parch-
ment, which lies on the table before the dead Carthagin-
ian. In this variant, the writing reads; “The anxiety of the
Romans is at an end. I am the old man for whose death
you have waited so long. There will be only one Rome,
but it might have been Rome or Carthage. . . .”

While at Zama, the three battles that became one de-
feat flare across infinity, and each of its three struggles is
an infinity, changing through infinitesimal steps. The Ro-
man horsemen do not return, having been ambushed by
the sons of Syphax and their Numidian cavalry, leaving
Hannibal to an honest test of his Bruttians against Sci-
pio’s weary infantry. A few variants earlier, the Roman
cavalry had arrived, but too late to save Scipio; and be-
fore that only at half strength; and before that . . .

The historian watched Carthage destroyed, then built
up into a Roman city because the site was too good a
center for commerce to be ignored. He watched Rome
leveled and raised into a Carthaginian city, for the same
reason. The variants ran through endless minor differ-
ences in these two outcomes, until he left these lines
behind.

He could have of probability what he wanted — but
what was it? An endless flickering stmctured out of
nothing, differentiated into individual things by mea-
surementlike interactions among components, copying
itself endlessly, providing examples but no prescrip-
tions. These could be studied definitively and forever,
but to no end. There was no wall around past quantum-
transitional time, so he could have of it what he wanted,
even though he could not stand apart from its infinity
and see it whole. Only the quantum future was forbid-
den, even to licensed historical observers, whose linear
and quantum history machines were restricted by basic
design. There had been a time when the study of history

had called for a concern with the future, then with alter-
nate futures, extending the study of the past toward the
creation of desirable futures; but the quantum-transitional
cliometricon had stifled that new history. Futurity’s infor-
mational influx into the past was feared and prevented;
and yet there had to be variants in which it was em-
braced, where cultures of past and future mingled infor-
mationally without fear, because they understood that
the stuff of being was blossoming into 100'“*'’* direc-
tions, matter and living flesh metamorphosing toward
distant, ever more tenuous and mysterious states, and
that these conscious innards of time must huddle all
their histories together. . . .

He imagined history whole — as a writhing, boiling
cloud. Cliometricians hurled themselves through the enig-
ma but could not stand away from it, which was what it
would take to penetrate its mystery. Objectivity was ru-
inously relative, after all; no one could have history as a
separate object of study, even though it seemed that way
in the view-tank, without remaining part of it. . . .

In Spain, a year before crossing the Alps into Italy, Han-
nibal marries a princess of Castulo, a dark-tressed wom-
an of the Olcades people, to help secure the frontier
between the Silver Mountains, the Iberians, and Carpe-
tanians, to strengthen the Carthaginian presence in
Spain.

On their wedding night, Hannibal mounts Imilce from
the rear, but after a few powerful strokes reveal her dis-
comfort, he turns her over on her back. She receives
him again and wraps her legs around his middle. Her
long hair is at her sides down to her waist. Her lips and
pale breasts swell as she nears completion. The dark-
skinned Hannibal cries out, bringing joy to her face.

“Come with me!” she whispers as he relaxes and
strokes her neck. “At Carthage we’ll take passage to
Greece, where you can take up the life of study that you
have desired.”

The Carthaginian shakes his head in denial. “War is
coming. My city will perish without me.”

“You flatter yourself,” she says. “Others also under-
stand what needs to be done. They will step into your
place.”

“But they don’t love the craft of war as I do. They
will never see what is possible, and fail.”

“The Romans are not fools,” she says, and closes her
eyes.

A year later, high in a stone tower, Imilce gives birth
to a son. Hannibal puts wife and child on a ship for
Carthage and marches his army toward the Alps. All
through the sixteen-year raid on the Roman peninsula,
he carries with him his wife’s parting gift — a small Greek
statue of Hercules — and rejects the enjoyment of captive
women. . . .

But across the variants, Imilce prevails. Word by word,
their discussion in the bridal chamber changes through a
thousand small steps, until finally Hannibal travels with
her and his son to Greece, where he perfects his use of
the language and writes a series of dialogues encompass-
ing the experience of Mediterranean peoples. Carthage

The Number of the Sand

withdraws from Spain. Rome is not roused from its re-
publican state. The two cities prosper and make treaties
of friendship, delaying the Punic Wars and the rise of
imperial Rome by a century. . . .

The historian asked himself, what could it all ever
mean? The significance of these varying moments had
peaked when they were happening. No one else could
ever have them from the inside except the original play-
ers. All historians tacitly entered the minds of past fig-
ures and imagined direct knowledge of their thoughts
and feelings. Cliometricians were the extreme of panop-
tic humankind, which observed itself endlessly, down to
the smallest details of life, displaying itself to itself, but
never able to become one. . . .

Perhaps there should be walls around time, he told
himself, and greater ones around individuals. The long-
lived should practice periodic amnesia, following the
way of the past’s short-lived generations, because histo-
ry is only important while it is being made . . .

. . . but there is never an empty moment. History is
being made all the time, so it is always important, even
though he could not say how. Being was adding to itself
endlessly, an infinite growing thing, branching, probing
through a greater infinity of probability, springing from
no soil and obeying no tropism. . . .

In the endless array of gossamer display tanks, each one
an event horizon on quantum-transitional times that can
be observed but not entered, the historian watches him-
self contemplating history from the center of an infinite
web of information. Once in a while he glances over his
shoulder at his unseen alternates, who see him turn his
head; but he can only see into the regress of variants in
front of him. Do all the cliometricians glance back simul-
taneously, as if the entire infinite set were one mind? He
imagines that vast intelligence sitting at the privileged
observer’s point, where all regress stops, even though
he knows there can be no such point. He could traverse
billions of variants and still hope to reach the privileged
point on the next try. Attempted passages across an in-
finity always generated the question: Is this an infinity,
or only very large? Aristotle had denied infinity because
it could only be defined, but never possessed.

The historian knows that he has lost his struggle with
history. Infinities are tractable only when treated as

A Brief History of "

George Zebrowski has been exploring the concepts em-
bodied in “The Number of the Sand” for nearly twenty
years. The original appearance of the idea was in a story
entitled “The History Machine,” which was first pub-
lished in 1972 in New Worlds Quarterly 3-

Long-time readers of AMAZING® Stories have encoun-
tered the idea once before, in a story called “The Clio-
metricon,” which appeared in the May 1975 issue and is
reprinted on the following three pages. That story has
extra significance for us and for George, because it was
his first appearance in this magazine.

wholes, but the mathematician’s way could never en-
compass the complexities of human events. He sits in
his cul-de-sac and yearns for the closure that would end
the dismay of infinities, the final, firm place to stand,
from which there is no one to glance back to, where all
perspectives converge into the sleepless eternity of per-
fect knowing that would never belong to him. He would
never awake from the dream of history in which he was
embedded and see it whole.

In the twenty years of wandering exile after his defeat at
Zama, Hannibal is told by a Greek oracle that he will be
buried in African soil. Untroubled that he will die before
returning home, he writes his brief study of history in
the house given to him by the king of Bithynia.

Across a million variants he glances out the window
and sees Roman soldiers closing their circle around the
house. He hides his manuscript in the hollow doorstone,
then swallows the poison in his ring. In the billionth
variant he learns too late that there is a place in Bithynia
called Africa, and that this house stands on it. He smiles
as he sits back in his chair, perhaps at the cleverness of
the Greek oracles, and his life slips away before the Ro-
mans reach the house. . . .

In the same year, across the sea, Scipio also dies, and
is buried outside Roman territory, in compliance with
his last wishes. . . .

The soldiers break into the house in Bithynia ... at
the thousandth variant they find the manuscript in the
stone ... in the trillionth the room is empty, but under
the table there is an open door into a tunnel that runs
through the hillside to the harbor. Quinctius Flamininus,
the Roman commander, notices that there is a note on
the table addressed to him. He picks it up and reads:

You are hardly a worthy descendant of the
men who warned Pyrrhus against the poison
prepared for them.

— Hannibal

He grimaces, peers into the hole under the table as if it
were a tunnel out of history, then hurries outside to the
cliffs edge and searches the sea. Hannibal’s ship is
halfway to the horizon, running with wind and tide to
fulfill the Greek oracle’s prophecy. 4 -

2 History Machine"

Jack Dann, quoted in editor Ted White’s introduction
to the original publication of “The Cliometricon,” had
this to say: “This kind of sf tale is a harbinger. Most
‘hard’ sf uses the hardware and technology which is a
by-product of pure science; this story extrapolates on
one facet of the philosophy of science; it uses the sf for-
mat to give flesh to otherwise inaccessible ideas.”

In our estimation it’s possible to get a fuller apprecia-
tion of “The Number of the Sand” by also experiencing
the story that preceded it. So here, for the benefit of
readers old and new, is . . .

George Zebrowski

The Cliometricon

Originally published in the May 1 975
issue of AMAZING® Stories

George Zebrowski

This universe is constantly splitting into a stupendous
number of branches, all resulting from the measurement-
like interactions between its myriad components. More-
over, every quantum transition taking place on every
star, in every galaxy, in every remote comer of the uni-
verse is splitting our local world on earth into myriads of
copies of itself.

— Bryce S. DeWitt,

“Quantum Mechanics and Reality,”
Physics Today, Sept. 1970

The cliometricon visualizes alternate histories.

A standard history machine enables us to see history
in terms of cause and effect. The cliometricon shows
lines of might-have-beens as causal probabilities. Both
types of apparatus are inaccurate to the degree that each
leaves out the experience-of-events. This phenomenon
must be supplied by the trained imaginations of licensed
historical obseivers.

Slowly, subtly, the cliometricon draws the basic quan-
tum transitional processes of time into itself, calculating
probabilities (a more general form of causality) more
like a banker than a gambler; and we see the stuff of
time take 100'°°'^'^ differing directions in the guise of
matter and living flesh.

It teaches the class of historians who have been pre-
viously restricted to standard home-line history machines
a sense of expanded contingency and complex determi-
nation, Clio, the muse of history, is wooed with measure
and analysis far beyond the linear perceptions of normal
observers. Alternate world-lines, we learn, are not mere
probabilities in a bloodless realm, but realities in the fin-
er stmctures of reality.

I am watching General Eisenhower as he walks along
the white cliffs of Dover. It is raining and his face is hid-
den in the shadow under his cap. His eyes move his
head to peer across the channel at the dark continent of
Europa which seems now forever lost to the will of the
failed invasion. . . .

In his mind rise up fearful bloody shadows of men

retreating, thrown dying into the sea by Rommel’s de-
fenses; whole divisions destroyed, burned and blinded
by the relatively mild effects of tactical nuclear artillery.
Lost, an entire world of towns and villages and cities,
bordered in the east by a giant who will not rise again
after being blackened into ash by the full-scale strategic
fury of Hitler’s themronuclear whirlwinds. The giant
who had been counted on to bleed the most is dead.

I push the clear tab for the If-Continuum System Inter-
lock. Before me, in blue light, appears a figure like my-
self sitting before a machine with his back to me. On his
screen appears another figure; and on his still another;
and another, into the vanishing point. System Interlock
mode functions check the world-lines for integrity. A
breakage would show itself as a chaos frame filled with
furious noise and random images.

Reality is a matrix of relatively fixed world-lines. If-
points exist as potentials in each line. If-points extend
themselves from a potentially contingent moment, though
not from all such moments, and also become relatively
fixed world-lines. It is the overlay of an infinite number
of if-lines which produces the perceived experience of
contingency, or choice, in an observer. The psychologi-
cal reality of observers integrates if-lines.

Historians debate whether world-lines are diverging in
absolute or relative space, or if they are converging to
form an integrated statistically determined world-line.
Breakages might be indications of unsuccessful integra-
tion processes brought about by unusually fluid thought
processes of observers in different lines. As long ago as
the 1970s Eugene Wigner had advocated a gross nonlin-
ear departure from Schrodinger’s normal equations, indi-
cating what must happen when conscious observers are
taken into account. 'Wigner even proposed that a search
be conducted for possible effects of consciousness on
matter. Today only a comprehensive System Interlock
meeting of scholars might resolve this problem, and per-
haps even help in the creation of an integrated line. But
this does not seem likely, as not all lines have devel-
oped cliometric technology. . . .

Cliometrics is a tool of empirical research and rec-
ord keeping — a significant improvement over the old

impressionistic, nondimensional, often univalent written
texts. Written texts were always observer distortions, ut-
terances rife with psychological reference errors; refer-
ence was made as much to the observer as to the vague
historical object. The result was a directional product of
the two, as well as an historical object of its own time.
Experience and subjectivity (both important facts about
observers) were conveyed only indirectly. The imagina-
tive memory of so-called novelists was the closest thing
to the direct scmtiny of today’s licensed temporal ob-
servers.

Cliometric technology recreates with precision direct-
ly from quantum physical sources, catching through
physical implication the play of permutations on the ex-
perienced level. . . .

There is a wind at Thermopylae.

The Spartan defensive force has not arrived. The mo-
ment of might-have-been has passed. The initial neces-
sary conditions were present, but the sufficient circum-
stances are absent.

The first Persian scouts are coming through the pass,
shielding their faces against the wind. . . .

Five thousand Spartans will not lie dead on the rocky
ground. Many will never see battle, siring hundreds of
children instead. Greece will not be stirred by the death of
Leonidas. He will die at the hands of a jealous husband.

As I watch, the efficient cause of all these things
comes into view — furies casting shadows onto the stone-
strewn landscape.

There are wings over Thermopylae, white wings in a
sun-windy afternoon. War gliders from Athens. Created
by Themistocles’s physicists.

As the Persians stream into the pass from their ships
on the shore, the Greeks glide in low and drop fireballs
on the advancing horde. And when finally Apollo’s
naphtha runs dry, the gliders turn wings and disappear.

A second squadron appears, riding into the updrafts
from the pass, rocking high above the reach of Persian
arrows and lances. . . .

Eisenhower pauses at the chalk cliffs edge. He is a dark
solid three-dimensional shadow in the light, a mere uni-
form stuffed with unseen flesh.

The screen lights up with an atomic flash, and I know
that his flesh is disintegrating, his skeleton is melting. The
fortress of England is crumbling. Shakespeare’s original
folios are ash upon the withering green. I turn down the
light streaming from the screen.

Somewhere above, I imagine clearly, the pilotless
bomber makes a slow turn and heads back toward the
Luftwaffe field in France, where they already know what
the bright western dawn means.

Rudolf Hess gets up from the remote control screen.
An aide takes over while he goes to the bunker slits to
peer out. The returning bomber is a dark insect against
the bright orange cumulus of megadeath.

Eisenhower tumbles off the cliff, his torso pierced clean
through by a bullet fired leisurely from the deck of the

submarine which only a moment ago surfaced offshore
and is already beginning to dive.

In the periscope, Eisenhower’s falling body looks for
just a moment like a black spider floating down on a
piece of web. The sea swallows his corpse as his aides
look on. From a distance their faces are only patches of
white.

The Spitfire aircraft will be too late to sink the sub.

We are the heirs of the old cliometricians, who in the
twentieth century first married the muse of history to
quantification. No one mind could see meaning in mass-
es of data so huge that light-years of distance would be
required simply to lay all the bits end to end.

But still the data was finite. It could be enumerated,
and even interpreted with the help of our children, the
computer minds.

Our task became harder, nevertheless.

The quantum of historical action is multifarious.

Probabilities are infinite. The store of alternatives is
eternal, inexhaustible. Only this fact and endless individ-
ual events are absolute.

The practice of our profession is safely incomplete. The
whole is divinely indefinable and mysterious.

Eisenhower swims to shore. Blood streams from his
shoulder and mingles with the sea foam as he struggles
onto a rock, where he manages to contain the flow until
a boat arrives.

He watches as the submarine is sunk by Spitfires.

The cliometricon is an endlessly growing library of visu-
al records (the visual form grew out of the entertainingly
contemplative motion picture arts of the twentieth cen-
tury). Parastatics, the technology of sub-molar engineer-
ing, led to the storage of infinite amounts of information
within the infinitesimal folds of space-time below the
Fermi threshold. Each record is filed with a library of as-
sessments and statistical evaluations. Every observer bias
is included and taken into account by the next observer.
Naturally, the home-line receives special attention in
terms of recorded bulk.

In that moment when he contemplates his plans for the
conduct of the war, Eisenhower is joined to the ultimate
enigma of time’s flow — the forward direction toward a
still formless future.

On the screen it appears as a shapeless chaos of the
thing-in-itself, the substratum of all that is large and
small, the malleable reality of infinite variation. This is,
of course, only a visualization, unlike the real-time re-
covery of overlaid events, which are also considerably
more regular.

In Eisenhower’s mind it becomes a determination of
decision, qualified by the probabilities of physical con-
trol during execution: he sees an invasion in which the
landing is never made; all ships are sunk or turned back
long before the landing barges can be launched; the army
comes ashore but is driven back into the sea by an over-
whelming panzer force; the Allies sweep across Europe,

George Zebrowski

only to be swept back by the Russian army whose com-
manders still remember Western intervention in their
post-revolutionary civil war (Dunkirk repeats itself on a
larger scale); the Allies use nuclear weapons to level
Germany, and later all of western Russia. . . .

Between all these events, I can see an infinity of triv-
ial variations and minor crises; while alongside these
events lie radical alternatives and their variations.

The continuum of probabilities is infinitely crowded.

World-lines growing out of the past thrust insistently
into a shapeless future. There is rest in the visualized
presence of the formless chaos on the screen. Here I
cannot retreat to a point where orderly patterns become
visible — the point at which waves seem to be well con-
centrated around their average length and the quantum
of action is negligible, the point in Schrbdinger’s equa-
tions where the shortness of wavelengths permits the
classical world of Newton to come into being. Here lies
the ultimate irrational. Here the agony of events has no
meaning, except that I visualize them.

Individuals perish, but the eyes of intelligence endure,
receiving the information which makes a universe exist,
ending the chain of infinite regression and possibility of
the indeterminate. Without eyes the thing-in-itself is cold
and lightless — despite its energy — and alone. The waves
of confusion and possibility do not coalesce into solid
matter; touch and sight cannot be born.

The consciousness of observers creates time and his-
tory. Objectivity is relative, but no less real.

Eisenhower shivers at Dover. Turning away from the
sea, he walks up the path to his jeep. He cannot be sure
of his world. He can plan, decide and carry out while
hovering at the abyss of uncertainty, an edge more fear-
ful than any cliff. In the firmament of time, his character
will play all possible roles, an endless fresco painted by
the muses of biology and physics. Armies will struggle,
are struggling, as I watch him drive away. . . ,

I push the minor System Interlock and watch myself
watching him drive away, toward where the road runs
close to the edge over the gentle breakers below. . . .

The road gives way. I cannot see the effect of Eisen-
hower’s trivial death on my face, unless I turn around
and watch my copy do the same in the mirror which I
have set up illegally behind myself. I turn around, know-
ing that I am violating the personal peeping prohibitions.
But this is the first time, and perhaps the corps of watch-
ers will not notice.

I want to feel what my alternates feel, at least one. I
want to feel his face in mine. I want to know at least
one other of the army of observers which fills up the
abyss within me. After all, they are all within me, and I
live in them. I will risk my tenure and the practice of
history-as-usual for this.

A face appears — my own, but much older.

‘“What do you want? A prolonged link is a violation.”

“I want to talk to you.”

“There is no time!”

I panic and push the button for a resumption of nor-
mal flow.

The universe moves with sleight-of-hand, the unknown
becoming known, time unfolding, ignorance leading to
discovery and knowledge. I feel the anguish of space-time
in a night land chilled by endless icy stars. Time and I un-
wind from darkness like a glittering snake. Time is the
dark pulsing body of the serpent, and I the glitter. Psy-
cho-physical parallelism is the central fact of history. . . .

Oppenheimer, Teller and Eisenhower visit the mins of
Moscow, now leveled by strategic nuclear weapons of
only low yield, while a world away Speer seeks to re-
cmit Einstein and Bohr for work in the victorious Reich.
Teller and Oppenheimer have committed suicide. . . .

Leonidas lies dying in the pass at Thermopylae.

Possibilities are slowly fading from his face, along with
the late afternoon sunlight. The soldiers around him look
like hard-shelled beetles in their armor. His face is my
face, his thoughts my own as death steals over him. . . .

There are some who deny the possibility of deducing
macro-events from micro-quantum events. The heresy
states that what we see on the screens of the cliometri-
con are imaginative extrapolations based on the wealth
of facts and assumptions inherited from the past. Bryce
S. DeWitt, a professor of the twentieth century, had re-
corded that “The quantum realm must be viewed as a
kind of ghostly world whose symbols, such as the wave
function, represent potentiality rather than reality.” If-
lines are not real.

Yet . . .

. . . Leonidas thinks as he lies dying, and his thoughts
press into me. Time passes, he whispers, and I feel vague
changes inside, wondering what is this effort of time
passing, this changing which seems not to change, this
journeying near the shore with no goal in sight? Famil-
iarity has dulled the questing in me, hiding enigmas in
the robes of everyday, preventing unmapped thoughts.
Does time pass where there are no heartbeats? If I could
only hold myself perfectly still, stay the mortal blood
passing from me into the earth, then I would hear time
pass near while never touching me. It would continue
to write in the ephemeris of the ephemeral, changing the
shape and shadow of all living things, excepting me. . . .

An atomic flash, followed by a xenomorphic mushroom.

Oppenheimer says, “I am become death, the shatterer
of worlds.”

Endless worlds, or the ghosts of chance?

This heresy has the power to consume me. >■

The Cliometricon

Fireballing

Illustration by Debbie Hughes

Gary W. Herring

“Painter and the crew are dead.”

The Tsarina’s matter-of-fact
announcement crackled over
the radio, and Steve swallowed
hard. One of the fireballers
swore softly, but beyond that,
the other ten men and women
in the shuttle’s passenger cabin
showed little emotion. Steve
realized that they’d been ex-
pecting the news. Everyone in
the Flying Circus had spent
more time in space than he
had — some of them lived up
here — and most must have
guessed what had happened
as soon as they’d felt the trem-
or that had run through the
shuttle barely an hour ago.

The automatic seal on the door
to the cockpit and the red
warning lights had clinched it.
The Tsarina had merely made
it official.

Steve had been staring mes-
merized at the flashing lights
while the Tsarina had suited
up and gone out the airlock
with the young man called
Dragon. It occurred to him
that he ought to be taping this.
His editor would have convul-
sions if he found out that Steve
Hart, daring vidjournalist, had
let a story like this slip by him.
He glanced out a porthole at
the Earth, far below, and de-
cided that Chuck Anzalone was
the least of his problems now.

“Stasya,” Captain Spalding
was saying into a radio from a

survival kit, “is the airlock still working? Can you get
into the cockpit?”

“We’re already in, Jeff,” the old Russian answered.
“There’s a hole in the hull I could drive a tractor through.
Thrust and attitude controls are gone altogether. Radio is
badly damaged. We can’t reach anybody with this. Some
damage to the computer, but ...” There was a pause,
and then the Tsarina gave them the rest of the bad news.

“Jeff, this hulk is falling out of orbit!”

There was more cursing from the others, a lot of it
this time. Steve looked around blankly. Captain Spalding
looked grim. “Are you sure, Stasya?”

“Positive,” came the reply. “Either they were about to
make a correction when things went blooey, or the im-
pact or explosion or whatever knocked us off course.
Whichever, this boat’s got maybe three hours before she
starts re-entry.”

Now Dragon’s voice came over the radio. “They’d
have started looking for us when our radio signal stopped.
Captain, but unless there’s somebody passing close by,
three hours ain’t enough time for anybody to reach us.”

Steve felt a roaring behind his ears. The shuttle was a
pressurized cylinder built to carry cargo and passengers
between geosynchronous and low-earth orbits. It wasn’t
meant to enter the atmosphere even with a crew and
controls.

“Stasya,” Captain Spalding asked, “do you see any
reason why we can’t go ahead and jump?”

“We won’t stand much chance of hitting our targets,”
the Tsarina replied, “but I don’t see any other choice.”

“Waitaminnit,” Steve blurted out. “What about me?” He
looked around at the fireballers. “You can’t leave me here!”

“Don't plan to,” Captain Spalding assured him. “You’ll
be jumping with us. We’ll try to recalibrate Painter’s rig.”

“Jump with you,” Steve repeated stupidly.

“You’re going to be re-entering one way or another,
Hart.” Captain Spalding smiled. “Your best chance is to
do it without a ship.”

The radio must have picked up the conversation, be-
cause Dragon suddenly crowed, “Hey, journalist. You’s
gonna get some local color!”

“Fireballing?” Steve asked in disbelief “You want me to
interview some fireballers?”

“They call themselves ‘re-entry clubs,’ ” Anzalone said.
“Personally, I call them crazy.” The editor of the south-
east branch of 'VideoNews leaned back in his chair and
smiled.

“It’s a great little opportunity, if I say so myself. In two
weeks a re-entry club called the Flying Circus is having
one of their little flings up in orbit, starting with a party
at Goddard City and a drop the next day. The Mother
Earth Party plans to protest.”

Steve grunted, unimpressed. This was hardly news.
Public opinion had been slowly turning back against
space for several years now, and the Mother Earth Party
had quickly targeted fireballing as a symbol of “the mad
waste of space exploration.” Steve didn’t see what fire-
balling had to do with exploration, but he was inclined
to agree that spending good money to get your ass fried

riding a rocket engine down from orbit required an ab-
solute contempt for all things sane and moderate.

“I suppose there’s going to be something special
about this protest,” he said. Anzalone nodded happily.

“When fireballers throw a drop party, they have to
register their target sites — the areas they’ll be trying to
land in. That info’s public, and a fireballer can usually
count on a little crowd joining the support crew that’ll
be waiting to meet him. This time, there’ll be an ME
protest group at each site, ready to hassle the fireballers
and grab the show. Both the Flying Circus and the
Mothers have agreed to let us send a reporter along
with each group. You drew the fireballers. Follow ’em
around, find out what makes ’em tick and send us some
interviews. Then pix ’em jumping. If you can get some
pix of somebody in re-entry, great. Pix of somebody
burning up would be perfect. Meanwhile, I’ll have Ruiz
taping the protests.” Anzalone beamed. “Play it right,
paisan, and you might finally get that 'Videoguild award.”

Steve stood before the little office’s only window and
frowned at the Atlanta skyline. There’d been talk of an
air alert yesterday, but last night’s sudden shower had
washed the sky clean. You wouldn’t think Atlanta had a
smog problem to look at the city now, but that meant
he’d have to be careful catching the bus home tonight.

At least bad air kept most of the muggers indoors.

He’d never been in orbit before, and it was an expe-
rience he could do without. There’d be no point in ask-
ing to cover the Mothers, though; it wasn't his image.
Steve Hart went where the action was: Jerusalem, Mexi-
co City, Des Moines. Couldn’t let the fans think he was
scared of heights.

People pay good money for a weekend up at Goddard,
he told himself. You re going on an expense account.
Nobody’s asking you to jump out of a spaceship.

Besides, it was a good opportunity. A story blasting
fireballers would tie in perfectly with popular sentiment
right now.

“When do I leave?” he asked.

“Look at the bright side,” Dragon said. “You came along
to shoot some pix, and there’s no reason you can’t leave
the camera rig attached to your helmet. You can pix
your own drop.”

Steve wanted to tell the scrawny little deadhead to go
to hell, but his mouth was too dry. Cheryl 'Vasquez looked
up from recalibrating the PAR'V’s guidance computer.
“Shouldn’t you get into your gear. Dragon?” she asked.
“You’re only distracting me here.”

“Yeth, Mommy.” Dragon grinned and left, giving
Steve a wink.

“He gets on our nerves too, sometimes,” Cheryl said.
“But he does good work.” She nodded to where Dragon
had wired the PARV’s comp up to the helmet display of
Steve’s bulky, rented p-suit.

“How’re you coming?” Steve asked. His voice sounded
hoarse in his ears. Hardly the calm, confident tones of a
daring VJ.

“Just about done,” Cheryl replied. “You’re a little small-
er than Painter was” — she swallowed and continued —

Fireballing

“but your suit’s bigger than any of ours, so you’ll mass
about the same, all together.”

You hope, Steve amended silently. He knew damn
well she was calculating by the seat of her pants. As she
finished, he looked over the vehicle he’d be riding down
to Earth.

Officially, a fireball was known as a portable atmo-
spheric re-entry vehicle: PARV for short. It had been ori-
ginally developed by the Soviets as a sort of parachute
for cosmonauts in low-earth orbit, and the design had
been adapted by a dozen other space-going agencies.
The first civilian re-entry clubs had appeared fifteen
years ago, and the first sporting model of the PARV had
come along a couple of years later.

Painter had been new to the sport, so his PARV was
pretty basic. Dragon called it a sissy because the heat
shield was particularly thick. Steve had once seen some
mock-ups of old spacecraft in a museum, and the PARV
made him think of a Mercury capsule’s skeleton. Struts
of tough composite formed an open framework in the
shape of a four-sided pyramid with a circular base three
meters across. Atop the pyramid was a modular propul-
sion/guidance package: thruster, attitude jets, fuel tank,
computer and parachutes. At the base was a couch for
the pilot and a collapsed plastic mold for the heat shield.
Control was provided by a joystick studded with buttons.

A fireballer dropped by strapping himself into a PARV
and being shoved out the airlock of a boat in low-earth
orbit. A press of a button inflated the mold at the base
of the PARV with a quick-hardening ablative foam stored
in canisters strapped to the support struts. Then the fire-
baller put the guidance display up on his helmet’s face-
plate, positioned himself just so and gave himself enough
of a push with the thruster to begin spiraling down to
the ground. Once through the ionization layer, the fire-
baller fell until an altimeter activated the parachutes that
carried him gently to the ground.

If everything went right. If something went wrong,
the fireballer usually died.

Steve wiped his forehead and put that thought aside.
It was either make the drop or ride the shuttle down,
and the shuttle would burn for certain. If Painter hadn’t
decided to visit the cockpit for a word with his fellow
jockeys, there wouldn’t be an extra PARV now, and God
only knew where that would have left him. He felt
grateful and guilty all at once.

He managed a weak grin, though, at the thought that
his only chance of getting out of this mess alive was a
dead man’s fireball that had been rewired by a Dragon
and reprogrammed by a Falling Angel.

There was a crowd of fireballers, tourists and Goddard
residents around the video games. When Steve pushed
through, holding his drink up out of harm’s way, he saw
one of the fireballers playing a game that supposedly
simulated re-entry in a PARV. Steve switched his camera
on and held it above the heads of the people in front of
him. The game’s video display came into focus in the
camera’s monocle eyepiece, and he noted with amuse-
ment that the young man seemed to be losing.

The fireballer wore a large red and blue patch on his
right shoulder that read “Flying Circus Re-Entry Club,”
with the motto “We Who Are About To Fry Salute You!”
around the border. Steve would have known the slender
young man for a fireballer even without the patch: he
was wearing metallic skintights with a scaly pattern that
shimmered green and red. Bright green scales had been
glued to his shaven scalp to complete the reptilian effect.

Compared to him, the rest of the Flying Circus was
rather plain, yet they stood out among the tourists and
residents who had joined the pre-drop party in the ho-
tel’s plaza. Captain Spalding, the mustachioed president
of the club, was tricked out in a safari jacket and pith hel-
met. A woman who looked to be fifty or so wore an an-
tique Soviet Aerospace Forces dress uniform with medals
all over the blouse. The Tsarina, as she was known, had
turned out to be a seventy-two-year-old retiree from
Titovgrad who claimed to have begun her career in space
as one of the last crewpersons of the old MIR station.

A canned explosion and the good-natured catcalls of
his audience signaled that the young fireballer had lost
the game. He bowed, clearly relishing the attention, and
started another. Steve had switched off his camera and
was backing out of the crowd when he felt a tap on his
shoulder.

“Finding what you’re looking for, Mr. Hart?”

Steve looked around. Captain Spalding beamed at
him and nodded to the center of the crowd. “Dragon
never beats that machine. He’s made fourteen drops —
thirteen of ’em successful — but that game makes a fool
of him every time. C’mon over to the bar.”

Steve followed the Captain to the outdoor bar that
had been set up for the pre-drop party. “Outdoor”
wasn’t strictly true, of course. Not 22,000 miles from
Earth. Goddard City had been one of the first space-
towns. It had been built primarily to house employees
from nearby factories and the Arizona powersat, but its
designers had foreseen the tourist market. The Goddard
Hotel was smaller and less luxurious than its later rivals
on the Moon and at the Lagrange points, but it offered a
close-up view of the Earth that was breathtaking, and
the hotel plaza was a lot like a park with its trees and
gently rolling lawn.

Once Steve had gotten used to the coriolis effects and
the one-fifteenth gee of the tourist level, he’d started en-
joying himself. He’d even screwed up enough nerve to
rent a set of plastic wings and take one of the hotel’s
free batwinging lessons. Anzalone had insisted on that.
Steve Hart, that daring VJ, wouldn’t go into space with-
out trying on some wings. He’d managed to glide across
the plaza and back without looking too foolish.

“Sorry it’s taken so long for us to get to you,” Captain
Spalding said as they bellied up to the bar. “We tend to
arrive a few days early for the drop and spend the time
going over our rigs. Somebody should’ve warned you.”

“S’okay,” Steve assured him. “I took a few tours. I
needed local color.” Actually, he had more local color
than he could ever use. Goddard was old news, but with
the Flying Circus holed up with their equipment and
definitely not interrupting safety checks for interviews, it

Gary W. Herring

had been either see the sights or spend two days bang-
ing his head against a wall. The time hadn’t been wast-
ed, though. He’d settled on an angle for the story.

Goddard, like fireballing, was high on the hit lists of
several pressure groups. It was the same basic line: the
money spent supporting the space cities and their atten-
dant factories and labs could be spent to better effect at
home — i.e., on whichever project the speaker’s outfit
supported. Privately, Steve wasn’t so sure of that. The
initial investments had been enormous, but Goddard
and many of the older projects were self-sufficient now.
He could draw a clear contrast between the idiocy of
fireballing and the useful work being done here. All he
really needed now were a few short interviews.

"When Captain Spalding had gotten his beer, Steve
switched his camera back on and aimed it at him unob-
trusively. “You said the man at the video games has
made thirteen successful drops out fourteen tries,” he
said. “How can anyone unsuccessfully re-enter the at-
mosphere in a PARV and survive? Don’t you burn up?”

“Burning up is only one of the things that can go
wrong with a drop,” Captain Spalding replied, wiping
beer from his mustache. “Dragon can spin you a better
story, but the bottom line is he miscalculated his angle
of re-entry. He bounced off the atmosphere and back
into space.”

“Is that dangerous?” Steve asked.

Spalding shrugged. “Depends on whether you’ve got
enough fuel left for another try. Dragon didn’t, and the
shuttle that had dropped him was out of range of his suit
radio.” He took another swig of beer before resuming.

“Ninety-nine times in a hundred, that would’ve been
it for Dragon. He got lucky, though. He wound up close
to a Japanese shuttle doing some satellite repair. They
heard his distress signal, picked him up and took him
down to Earth. Longest longshot anybody ever heard of
"We still rib him about it; the shuttle was named Serene
Dragon, and that’s how he got his club-name.”

Steve looked back at the gaudy young man playing
the video game and shook his head wonderingly.

“Where did you get your nickname, Captain?” he asked.

“Old videos,” a woman’s voice said. “Hi, Captain.
Hooray, hooray, hooray.”

The speaker was a slim, athletic-looking woman with
a Hispanic cast to her features. She wore a jet-black
skintight-and-skirt with the Flying Circus patch on an
armband. Her earrings and necklace were made of chips
of milky gray stone set in thin gold wire. The chips were
shot with veins of yellow, and Steve nearly choked on
his drink when he realized that they were thin, polished
wafers of gold quartz. The young man with her was
plain by contrast, wearing slacks, shirt and a jacket that
bore the club patch and a shuttle pilot’s badge.

“Hi, Angel, Painter,” Captain Spalding said. “Steve
Hart, meet Falling Angel.”

The woman offered her hand. “My real name’s Cheryl
■Vasquez. Pleased to meet you, Mr. Hart. I’ve seen a lot
of your work.”

“Thank you,” Steve said as he took her hand. “You
know, you’re the first to offer me your real name.”

“Not surprising,” she replied with a smile. “Clubs tend
to be tight-knit; nobody’s sure yet if you're friend or foe.”

“But you are?” Steve asked with a smile of his own.

Cheryl shnigged eloquently and ordered a scotch.
Steve turned to her companion. “George Painter,” the
fellow said, shaking hands. “This’ll be my first drop, so
no nickname or titles yet. That'll change tomorrow.”

“Pleased to meet you,” Steve said. He looked from
one to the other and asked, “As long as I've got the
three of you right here, can I ask a few questions?”

“Shoot,” said Captain Spalding.

Steve openly trained his hand camera on the Captain.
“So tell me,” he asked, “how did you get started in this”
— he paused for effect — “hobby?”

“Through Stasya.” The Captain nodded in the Tsarina’s
direction. Steve panned and took a shot of the old sol-
dier. “She’d made a few drops in her service days,” Cap-
tain Spalding said, “and she kept it up after she retired.
She started the Flying Circus.”

“Curiosity, in my case,” Cheryl said. “I'm a systems
designer at Moonbase. Some people from the club hired
me to customize the computers on their PARVs. To un-
derstand what was needed, I made some practice drops
on the Moon and — ”

“’Wait,” Steve broke in. “Practice drops on the Moon?”

“Sure. You have to modify the PARV a little, but with
the low gravity and no atmosphere, the Moon’s just
about ideal for a beginner. Anyway, the practice drops
hooked me.”

Painter grinned nervously when the camera turned to
him. “I guess I got curious too.”

“It all sounds expensive,” Steve said. “How do you
justify spending money on such a frivolous hobby?”

“Since it’s our money,” Captain Spalding retorted, “I
don’t see why we have to ju.stify anything.” Painter nod-
ded vigorously. Cheryl gave Steve a sharp look.

“You can ask that about any hobby, Mr. Hart,” she
said. “Skiing and mountain climbing are expensive too.”

“Nothing like buying and maintaining a PARV, surely,”
Steve said. “Then there’s the trip to orbit, shuttle passage
to your drop point, the fees and paperwork. In your case,
Ms. Vasquez, there’s the trip back to the Moon when
you’re done. I’m sure there’s more that I’ve left out.”

“It can get costly,” Captain Spalding admitted. “The
clubs help share the burden. Fortunately, most of us
work up here. 'We’re handsomely paid.”

Steve smiled crookedly. That remark wouldn’t endear
the Captain to the minimum-wage voters on the ground.
“Okay,” he said, putting just a bit of skepticism in his
voice to show his fans that the answers he was getting
weren’t really satisfactory. “’Why do you do it? What
makes you spend so much money and risk a horrible
death for nothing?”

All three fireballers were silent for a moment. Steve
thought gleefully that he’d stumped them, but then
Painter asked, “Why not?”

“I beg your pardon?”

“I piloted the shuttle for a few drops before I joined
the Circus,” Painter explained. “Sometimes I talked to
the fireballers. They all seemed so alive before and after

Fireballing

a drop. I want to see why.” The pilot shrugged. “Could
be that this one drop will be enough to convince me
that it isn’t worth it.”

“You ceuld get killed on your first try,” Steve pointed
out, using a voice of slightly derisive surprise this time.
“Is curiosity worth that?”

“I could get killed every day,” Painter replied, making
a gesture that encompassed the hotel’s plaza. “It’s as safe
as we can make it up here, but I could get caught in a
radiation flare, or my shuttle could be holed by a me-
teorite.” He shrugged again. “You learn to deal with it.”

Steve was silent as Cheryl and Dragon strapped him into
the PARV and maneuvered him through the shuttle’s car-
go bay, toward the now open cargo lock. Cheryl began
a final equipment check and Steve watched the other
pressure-suited figures as they prepared to leave the
shuttle.

He was going to be the first out. That made him
sweat a little, though he knew that no one position in
line was any more dangerous than another. Except for
the last one. With no shuttle crew, the last man out
would have to push his PARV away from the crippled
boat and then strap himself in. The Tsarina and Captain
Spalding had argued briefly and Intenc^ly over which of
them would take the end of the line. The Captain was a
veteran dropper, but the old Russian had more practical
experience in free-fall, so Captain Spalding had given in
with obvious reluctance.

It seemed to Steve that he ought to be reviewing his
life right now, but he came up blank. That bothered
him. He tried to calm himself by going over the quick
lesson Captain Spalding had given him in piloting a
PARV, but it all ran together in his head. Except for the
part where the Captain had asked him when he’d last
eaten and explained what happened if you threw up in
your p-suit in zerct-gee.

That really bothered him.

“You’re okay, Steve.” Cheryl’s voice came over the
suit radio as she knelt beside him. “When I tell you, acti-
vate your suit’s emergency beacon. Remember, this but-
ton on the control stick releases the shield foam. The
center toggle under your faceplate activates the helmet
display. Switch it on as soon as you’re out. Fuel read-
out’s on the bottom of the display. Optimum angle and
speed are on top in red and your real angle and speed
are below in white. Pitch and yaw are on either side.

The most important part of the display is the target in
the center: a white square with a red dot. The control
stick moves the dot — keep it centered in the square.”

She paused. He couldn’t see her face through the hel-
met of her p-suit, but Steve could guess what was going
through her mind. There were dozens of things she
could tell him that would help his chances, but there
simply wasn’t time to explain them, and if she confused
him . . .

“Cheryl?” he asked.

“Yes?”

“Can you keep a secret?”

“On an open radio channel?”

“Hart isn’t my real name,” he told her. “It’s Hartselle.”

Silence, and then, “Why’d you change it?”

“I thought Hart was more telegenic,” he admitted.

“I’m an actor, see. Somebody else pixes the news. I dub
in the report from a hotel room miles from any trouble.
The editors mix the two. Only time I’m ever on the spot
is when I’m doing a live interview, and I take body-
guards along for those.”

Cheryl held up a hand. “It’s your life. You don’t have
to explain — ”

“If I make it,” Steve interrupted, “can I come to the
post-drop party? As a guest?”

She thought about it and said, “Maybe. I’ll give you a
call after the drop and we’ll talk about it.” She reached
over and gave his p-suited arm a squeeze. “Turn on
your beacon.”

Steve tongued the beacon switch on and heard Cap-
tain Spalding say, “All right, everybody. Time to go.
Dragon, c’mere and give me and Angel a hand.”

The three fireballers turned Steve to face outside and
positioned him at the edge of the cargo lock. Wide-eyed,
he looked out into infinity, his breath coming fast and
rough. He remembered the vidcamera mounted on his
helmet and reached up to turn it on.

“Luck, man,” Dragon said. “See you at the party.”

“Remember what I told you about the display,” Cheryl
said. “And good luck.”

“Now," Captain Spalding said, and they pushed him
out into space.

“Doesn’t your life have enough risks without you look-
ing for new ones?” Steve asked.

Cheryl laughed warmly. “You didn’t have to come all
the way to GEO to ask someone that.”

It was late, and the pre-drop party was breaking up
around them. Some couples danced. Dragon was still at
the video game. A few people watched a portion of the
lounge’s media wall as it played a tape of one of the
club’s earlier drops. It looked like pix of falling stars to
Steve, but the audience oohed and aahed and clapped.

“I’m serious,” he said, with nothing in his voice this
time but curiosity. “You’re successful at your work. Liv-
ing on the Moon, I’d say you’re already an adventurer.”

“Adventuress,” she corrected him.

“What I mean is, what’ve you got to prove? You nev-
er told me why you do it.”

Cheryl grew thoughtful and said, “I have more drops
behind me than anyone, except for Stasya and Jeff, and
I don’t see all that much risk in fireballing anymore. I’m
no daredevil. Stuff they do down on Earth — cave diving,
bridge jumping — scares the hell out of me.” The wall
caught her attention. “That’s me,” she said delightedly,
pointing at a crimson streak of light.

“The others were yellow or white,” Steve noted.

“I added a chemical to my heat shield that made it
burn red,” she explained. “Watch. Dragon’s coming up
and his’ll be green.” When the green streak had flared
and faded Earthward, she looked at him.

“What about you?” she asked. “You’ve got a reputa-
tion for taking risks for a story.”

Gary W. Herring

One Against All and All Against the
Saurons in a World Forever at War

■l^auRONli

inomiNicwji

AUGUST 1991

CREATED BY
JERRY POURNELLE

Born of rebellion and civil war, cut off
from the rest of humanity after the
Secession Wars, the planet Haven
has been bombed back to a pre-tech
medievalism by a race of hideous
"supermen" intent on keeping the
planet cut off from the rest of the
empire while they slowly absorb all
normal humanity into their own
perverted form. Haven is a world for-
ever at war, each with all and all
against the Saurons. In Volume One
we saw the destruction of the Saurons
as a galactic power and the flight of a
saving remnant to Haven. In Volume
Two it looked for a while as if human-
ity might have a chance as Saurons
warred with each other. But in
Volume Three, the Saurons are poised
to achieve Final Dominion...

Praise for the War World series:

"Poumelle has done his
^^}iomework...War World will be
^ a popular place indeed."

— Wilson Library Bulletin

"A space opera fan's
dream come true..."

— Rave Reviews

Ajt

Distributed by Simon & Schuster • 1230 Avenue of the Americas • New York. NY 10020

Steve smirked. “My editor’ll be happy to hear that.
Tmth is, I go straight to a locale, do the job and then
get out. I don’t look for unnecessary trouble.”

“And neither do I,” said Cheryl. “Fireballing is a well-
calculated risk. If the odds weren’t in my favor, I wouldn’t
do it.” She grinned and added, “Though if there weren’t
a little danger, there’d be no point in doing it.”

“In other words,” Steve asked sarcastically, “there’s
just enough chance of getting killed to make it fun?”

“Exactly.” Her smile was challenging now. “And what
do you do for thrills, Mr. Hart?”

Steve clenched his teeth against a sudden wave of nau-
sea as the PARV tumbled end over end. His heart pound-
ed, and the vast Earth passed before his visor and out of
sight. Then there were stars, and then the Earth, and
then stars. . . .

Cheryl’s voice crackled in his helmet. “The foam,
Steve,” she shouted. “Release the foam!”

Steve pressed the foam release button with a convul-
sive twitch of his thumb and tongued the helmet display
switch. The display from the PARV’s computer appeared
on the faceplate of his helmet, overlaying the stars that
spun by. At one corner, the words FOAM RELEASE flashed
in red. The target square sat in the center and the red
dot was moving across the screen, disappearing at the
bottom and reappearing at the top.

He couldn’t do anything until the heat shield was in
place, so he concentrated on the display. That seemed
to ease his vertigo. Once more he thanked God that
Painter’s PARV was a beginner’s model. The guidance
display was fairly simple. It looked a lot like the display
of the video game back at the hotel lounge.

The one that Dragon kept losing.

The flashing FOAM RELEASE was replaced by a steady
blue SHIELD READY. Steve had to take the computer’s
word for it. He couldn’t look around to see for himself.
Carefully, he activated the attitude jets and moved the joy-
stick. Numeric displays to either side of his faceplate be-
gan to change, but he paid closest attention to the red
dot. Its passage across the screen slowed, slowed, and fi-
nally stopped. "White crosshairs spun on the dot’s surface,
warning that the PARV still spun on its axis. He gently
killed the rotation and centered the dot within the square,
then looked through the display at his surroundings.

To his right was a vast, velvety-black field spangled
with hard points of light. It made him think of Cheryl’s
gold quartz necklace against the black skintight she’d
worn at the party yesterday. To his left was the blue-
green disc of the Earth, too big for him to see it all.

Great whorls of clouds obscured the lines of the conti-
nents. He was falling backwards between Earth and sky,
but it seemed as though he were lying back upon a mo-
tionless couch and watching the black and the blue-green
rise up around him and curve away somewhere above.

As he watched, a huge shadow appeared on the face
of the Earth, sweeping from some point behind him and
swiftly covering the globe like a nightmare tide. Night,
he realized dreamily. I’m over the nightside now.

He tore his eyes from the scene with an effort. The

pretty atmosphere would kill him if it could, and the
stars wouldn’t care in the least. He checked and double-
checked the display. If the computer was working prop-
erly, if he was interpreting the information properly, he
was ready to start down.

If.

He couldn’t stay up here forever. He squeezed a trig-
ger on the joystick and the PARV’s main thruster came to
life. A shudder ran through the vehicle as the rocket
pulled at it, slowing it until it entered what Cheryl had
called a transfer orbit. The display’s red dot tried to
leave the target square. Steve moved it back into place
and braced himself for what was coming next.

"When the PARV dropped to the proper velocity, the
thruster would have to be cut. An experienced fireballer
knew exactly when to do this and did it manually. Eor-
tunately. Painter’s PARV was automated. "When the vehi-
cle hit the edge of the atmosphere, something Captain
Spalding had called aerobraking would slow it further
and the thruster would no longer be needed. Steve
watched as the velocity display fell and reached the cut-
off point.

Nothing happened. The velocity passed the cutoff
point and kept falling! The red dot jumped out of the tar-
get square and warnings flashed on the helmet display,
telling him that the PARV was no longer correctly angled.

Swearing, he cut the thruster by hand and waited to
see if the computer would correct the PARV’s attitude it-
self. It didn’t. The hurried rewiring and recalibration on
the shuttle must have fouled the automatics somehow.
He’d have to correct the angle by hand, and he’d have
to do it fast.

Steve worked the joystick, trying to get the dot back
in the square. Think of it as a game, he told himself.
Move the stick and put the dot in the square. It’s harder
this time. Time? How much time’s left? How much fuel’s
left? Damn computer probably knows, but I don 't know
how to ask it.

Sweat was running down his back in spite of the
p-suit’s humidity control. Below him, the Earth’s surface
seemed to pass by faster as he spiraled down. The red
dot inched its way toward the center of the display as if
it had all the time in the world. “C’mon,” he chanted as
it kissed the edge of the square. “C’mon. C’mon.”

A hard jolt hit the PARV and the dot skidded across
the screen. Steve manhandled it back toward the center.
The PARV bucked again. And again. He was aware of a
steady vibration running through the vehicle. Sparing a
glance at the velocity readout, he saw that it was drop-
ping fast. An orange glow appeared at the edge of his
vision.

The atmosphere!

The vibration increased until he could feel it in his
bones. He gritted his teeth, but the vibration made them
chatter anyway. His hands locked on the joystick in a
stranglehold. He gave up on keeping the dot in the cen-
ter of the square; the way he was being shaken around,
he could hardly see it anyway.

Around him, the orange glow lengthened into streams
of fire that extended overhead like the walls of a tunnel.

Gary W. Herring

just as if he were plummeting backwards into Hell. He
fought an urge to try to look over his shoulder. The vi-
bration roared through him. His heart felt squeezed and
his breath hissed through his teeth. His jaw hint from
being clenched for so long. Overhead, the walls of the
fire tunnel had met in the distance; the sheets of orange
flame merging at the center of his vision.

And with a suddenness that made him yell, the flames
turned a bright lime-green!

And then cherry-red.

And then cobalt-blue.

Steve gaped as the flames passed through a rainbow
of colors. Then he recalled the colored trails he’d seen
on the tape last night and he laughed as he realized
what Painter had done. The novice had gone the old
hands one better. He’d figured out a way to add ingredi-
ents for several different colors and have the additives
separate out into their own layers when the foam mate-
rial was setting up. The rest of the Flying Circus would’ve
killed to be sitting where he was now, and that thought
made him laugh louder as the flames turned a rich, roy-
al purple and began to thin. Soon the burning tunnel
was reduced to a few thick ribbons of fire, then to a
sullen, smoldering glow, and finally nothing.

The altimeter read 50km. According to the clock, less
than fifteen minutes had passed since he’d entered the
atmosphere. I'm through, he told himself, and he felt
faint.

"When the altimeter reached 30km, the drogue chute
deployed with a jolt that made him bite his tongue. The
sudden pain and the taste of blood woke him up, and
he wondered where in the world he was. The base of
the heat shield was still intact, so he couldn’t see the
ground even if he twisted his head around. For all he
knew, he could be heading for an active volcano.

“Heat shield,” he muttered. “How the hell do you jet-
tison the — ah!” He flipped the safety cover off a button
on the joystick and thumbed it. The charred remnant of
the PARV’s heat shield dropped away, and his couch
.suddenly pivoted him into an upright position. He
squawked with fright, but the couch’s harness held him
securely. Now he could see where he was going.

God, but it was still a long way down!

At five kilometers, the main chute opened. Now he
was supposed to choose a spot to land. It was daylight.
The terrain below was flat and grassy. Kansas prairie, or
African savannah? The helmet display told him that his
suit’s emergency beacon was still broadcasting his posi-
tion to any satellite in range. Good. It might be a long
walk back home otherwise.

Handles on two of the PARV’s struts worked the main
chute’s concealed steering cords. Skydiving was some-
thing else Steve had never done. Nonetheless, he man-
aged to skirt some rocks before he landed. He did remem-
ber that you were supposed to bend your knees to ab-
sorb the shock of hitting the ground, but the impact
knocked the wind out of him anyway. The PARV bounced
and slammed the ground hard. The wind caught the
parachute and dragged the battered vehicle through the
grass. No one had told him how to jettison the chute, so

he could only curse and hope that his suit would save
him from broken bones.

Finally, the PARV fetched up against some scruffy ev-
ergreens and the ride across the prairie was over. He lay
there a long time, wheezing.

It was over. It was over. He could open his helmet
now. Hell, he could take the damned suit off. He could
see what was to eat in the survival kit. He could throw
up if he liked. No, first break out the radio and see if
there was a ride in calling range, then eat something.

The rest could wait.

He undid the suit’s collar seals and removed the hel-
met. The little vidcamera mounted on the helmet was
still intact and mnning. He shut it off with a shaky
chuckle. Then he remembered the tunnel of rainbow
fire, and he grinned.

After some fiddling with the radio, Steve picked up the
local emergency band and learned that he’d come down
in Saskatchewan, just over a hundred miles from Regina.
A rescue chopper picked him up a few hours later. He
called Anzalone from the airfield and explained what
had happened.

“I’m sending a plane,” the editor told him. “Don't let
that camera out of your sight. So help me, if there’s five
seconds clear enough to put on the air. I’ll adopt you!”

They started reviewing the tape as soon as he walked
into Anzalone’s office. The resolution got pretty bad in
places, but there were several spots where Painter’s col-
ored flames could be seen clearly.

“■We’ll do a voice-over to describe what’s happening
when,” Anzalone said. “You can explain the vibration
and everything. We’ll play the clear parts in slo-mo to
make ’em last. We can run the whole thing as a special
right after the report on the accident.” The flames on the
screen changed color again. “Jesus,” Anzalone breathed.

“Painter gets full credit for that,” Steve demanded. He
was ready for an argument, but Anzalone nodded.

“Sure, sure. We can work it up as a fireballer’s mas-
terpiece. A work of art from space. We can interview his
friends.”

The Flying Circus! Shit, he’d forgotten! “Any word
about them? Did they make it down okay?”

“Here.” Anzalone handed him a notepad. “Phone mes-
sages asking about you. First one came in half an hour
before you called. That Dragon character is weird.”

Steve scanned the list of names. Jeff Spalding, Stasya
Bulganin, Dragon, Cheryl Vasquez . . . they were all
there. They’d all made it down.

“I gotta use the phone.”

“Sure thing.” Anzalone was still watching the flames.

“And I’m using my real name when we broadcast
this, okay? Hartselle, not Hart.”

Anzalone nodded absently. “Y’know,” he said, “the
Mothers’re gonna wish you’d burnt up.”

Steve grinned and punched the number by Cheryl’s
name. The line rang once, and then Cheryl said, “Hello?”

“Hi.” He groped for words. Finally he asked, “Where’s
the party?”

Fireballing

The Glory of War

John Maxstadt

General Nelson’s aide inter-
rupted a staff meeting to bring
the general news of a victory
over the Red Army. A compa-
ny of light infantry, led by Cap-
tain Thomas Jonathan Jackson,
had stormed Tennyson’s Ridge
and broken the enemy line in
hand-to-hand fighting, captur-
ing the Red Army’s artillery
and routing the remains of
their infantry from the field.
Casualties had been high on
both sides, and Captain Jack-
son had been among the fall-
en. General Nelson judged the
news to be highly satisfactory.

The general’s staff set its
other business aside and con-
sidered the disposition of the
casualties. As always, the
wounded could be patched up
and returned to the fighting,
but the dead would have to be
completely rebuilt. Fortunately,
combat robots were much
more easily repaired and re-
assembled than human sol-
diers had been. Even those that
were utterly destroyed could
be salvaged for parts and ma-
terials, eliminating entirely the
waste that had once obscured
the true nobility of warfare.

Illustration by Michael Weaver

There was no policy for dealing with deserters be-
cause there were no deserters. Artificial intelligence gave
combat robots individual volition up to a point, but they
were uniformly programmed for bravery, gallantry, and
even heroism in battle. Permanently relegated to the
past was the cowardly, selfish concern for life and limb
that had so grievously tarnished the dignity of soldiery
in the old days.

Standard procedure dictated that General Nelson’s
staff dispose of the casualties and survivors of Tenny-
son’s Ridge according to the degree of bravery each had
exhibited, even though most of the disparities had been
caused by unequal opportunities in the battle. Most of
the soldiers were simply repaired or rebuilt as necessary
and retained in their former ranks and stations; those
that had been in the Red Army had their allegiance pro-
gramming altered. The more notable heroes from the
winning side were slated for promotion. Those moving
from enlisted status to commissioned rank would be re-
tooled and reprogrammed accordingly.

Undamaged captives from the Red Army and other
robots that had displayed deficient courage were modi-
fied and demoted to civilian status. General Nelson re-
gretted the severity of this procedure, particularly since
the standards for bravery had become stricter every
year. However, some exchange between the military
and civilian work forces was necessary in order to re-
ward the most outstanding of the robots who labored
without renown in the manufacture of sabers, muskets,
and cannons, the most powerful weapons permitted un-
der the present agreements.

General Nelson took the special case of Captain Jack-
son’s remains under personal advisement and deemed
the rest of the arrangements highly satisfactory. The gen-
eral’s staff accepted “highly satisfactory” as the general’s
highest praise. They knew that nothing would ever
again be “entirely satisfactory.”

The general’s aide returned and announced that the
Battle of Tennyson’s Ridge had been officially declared
a historic victory, to be chronicled by the foremost poets
in the military think tanks. The principal hero of the bat-
tle had been Captain Jackson, a robot which had defi-
nitely added luster to the distinguished military history
of the name it had been assigned. Also designated as of-
ficial heroes were Lieutenant Colonel George Edward
Pickett, Lieutenant Nathan Hale, Sergeant David Glasgow
Farragut, Sergeant Alvin Cullum York, and Corporal
George Amistrong Custer.

All present were profoundly moved by the reading of
the names of these valiant robots, who had laid down
their lives in battle and who would surely be called
upon to do so again. The general’s aide, its duty done,
turned and wheeled itself back down the corridor.

At length, General Nelson reached a decision on the
final disposition of Captain Jackson’s remains. The hero’s
electronic brain would be incorporated into General
Nelson’s own, and what could be salvaged of the cap-
tain’s body would be used to repair and expand the
general’s. Mere captains were seldom accorded this high
honor, but the general’s staff agreed that it was justified

by the valor Captain Jackson had shown in combat; had
that valor been any less, the remains could just as easily
have been built into any one of them.

There was plenty of room for dozens of Captain Jack-
sons in General Nelson. General of the Blue Army Hora-
tio Lord Nelson was a vast and diverse robot, whose
body encompassed the entire Command Complex and
whose electronic brain supervised all operations from
the movement of battalions to the everyday functioning
of the autofarms that produced fuel for the robots and
fiber for their uniforms. Victory by victory, the Blue
Army and its general were growing larger and stronger.
By the time the Red Army was defeated and its general
destroyed. General Nelson would be ready to split into
two complete and independent generals. Half of the
staff and troops would follow each, just as they had
done when the Red and Blue Armies grew out of the
old Purple Army, which had defeated the Orange Army
in the previous war.

Quite literally constructed from the minds of heroes
past and present. General Nelson’s consciousness was
uniquely qualified to appreciate the glory of war as
waged by robots in the twenty-third century. It was all
poetry and no suffering, all color and pageantry and no
mud and squalor, all patriots and heroes and no widows
and orphans. It had become what it was always meant
to be — the noblest and most beautiful achievement of
humankind. General Nelson considered every aspect of
it to be highly satisfactory.

If humankind had not been accidentally extinguished
prior to the weapons limitation agreements, it would all
have been entirely satisfactory.

The Glory of War

In the

Lowerarchy

of the

Underpinning

Illustration by Mark Maxwell

William John Watkins

T-Char worked in the Under-
pinning for the Redevelopment
Lctwerarchy of Style City, the
last of the freefloating habitats.
As a Mindmaster Common, he
had nine Prims in his charge;
every one of them would have
been a capital felon in any oth-
er habitat. He met with them
in their holding, their section
of the maze of pipes and struc-
ture that lay between Style City,
the core of the habitat, and its
outer skin. It made no differ-
ence where they met; they
were his Recruitment because
some form of groupghastliness
had forced them to a choice
between Redevelopment and
having what was left of them
stuffed down the flushpipe
with the rest of Style City’s
waste. It was a simple choice,
Recruitment or oblivion, one a
Prim might be expected to
make and stick to.

Most chose Recmitment
over oblivion; for the majority,
it made no difference. For the
survivors, it meant a chance to
join the Lowerarchy and per-
haps even rise to the Hierar-
chy. It was unlikely, but some
had been known to go as high
as Class Two. For them all,
though, it was entertainment, a
chance to hang a Mindmaster’s
ears on their belt.

To T-Char, they were just
the latest in a long line of
Primitive Aggressives that had

encouraged him to develop an almost clairvoyant aware-
ness of what was above and below him, in front and be-
hind. Strongar was only the hungriest of them. T-Char
called him “Butnot.” It came from their first clash, the
first day T-Char had ducked into the low arched entry of
their holding. Strongar had jumped him from the thin
ledge above the door, screaming “Strongar!” as he fell.

It was a thin ledge, hardly wide enough for a pair of
toes, above suspicion. But T-Char’s beard had gone gray
and his head bald passing under similar arches, and he
took a halfslider backwards and let the Prim fall directly
in front of him. Strongar landed on his feet, but he was
facing the wrong way and T-Char fourknuckled him in
the back of the head and put him on his face. “But not
smarter,” was all he said.

It had become a more or less personal struggle since
then, as unvarying in its dialogue as a running private
joke. Every time the Prim tried to kill him, growling or
screaming “Strongar,” the Mindmaster would correct him
with a stiffkick or a fourknuckle or a palmbutt, and say
quietly “But not smarter.” Sometimes, if it were an espe-
cially good attempt, or one that he had made look par-
ticularly feeble, he would say the whole punchline:
“Strongar, but not smarter.”

Invariably, the other Prims howled with glee and
swung down to the floor from the pipes, or jumped up
on the big flowline and crouched there, chattering like
rats. But they were always quiet by the time Strongar
got his head clear and started looking for somebody to
pounce on for laughing at him.

T-Char used the confrontations to teach them all the
first lesson in the mentality the Upworld had sent him to
teach. “You screw, you due,” he told them in Gruntish.
In the Upworld, T-Char would have said, “A man is re-
sponsible for his actions. Failure has its price.” But he
went irregularly above street level anymore. There was
something that grated on him about the condescension
of the Class Ones who congratulated him on his “Great
Service” in the Underpinning.

Even in the slickyclutching, some bounciful empty-
head was bound to ask him if he didn’t feel wonderftil
when he Redeveloped one of his Primitive Aggressives
into a Functional Citizen. Even Class Two women, lying
rosy and short of breath, were as likely as not to ask him
if he didn’t get a glow of satisfaction when one of his
Prims turned up Honors on the Deadroll from some plan-
etary war or finally made Stimulator on some local world.

He went Upworld just often enough to keep the
Headholder from pulling his Master’s for excessive asso-
ciation with his charges, but it always left a bad taste in
his mouth when the Smoothers wore off and he could
recall the squeezetalk he’d put up with smiling, just to
get some Glaze & Relief. Sometimes he wondered if
maybe they ought to pull his Social Identification and
reassign him. Sometimes, he thought maybe he was get-
ting just a little too much like the Prims he bent into so-
cial shape for the Upworld. Excessive association was
an occupational hazard.

He wouldn’t be the first Mindmaster to have the
seaminess of the Underpinning seep into his brain and

drive him Primitive. It always gave him a shiver to think
of turning Renegade, popping into the Upworld for a lit-
tle Bloodnastiness and then disappearing back into the
Underpinning again like the Primitives he was supposed
to Redevelop. But whenever it crossed his mind, he
brushed it aside with the assurance that the Headholder
would pull him up before things got that bad. He was
too good at what he did for them to take the chance of
having him go Renegade on them. It would take every
Stimulator in the Lowerarchy to catch him once he went
bad, and even then the only chartce they would have
would be to send his own Prims into the Underpinning
after him.

It took a lot of hard people to keep Style City running
smoothly and to see to it that everybody stayed in their
place, and many of the Prims he’d Redeveloped had
joined the ranks of Enforcement and risen from Rank to
Stimulator to Interrogator. It took Redeveloped Prims to
protect everybody else from the Primitive Aggressives
who popped out of the Underpinning without warning
for some Punch & Grab or a bit of Bloodnastiness.

Only a former Prim could go into the Underpinning
and expect to come out again. All Mindmasters were Re-
developed Primitive Aggressives who had made a re-
markable second level adjustment. Some even functioned
on the same levels of rationality as the Class Ones. They
were Lowerarchy heroes, but T-Char thought of it only
as being a mutant, a thinking Prim, too smart to live in
the Underpinning, too different to fit in anywhere else.
Sometimes he wondered what he was protecting and
why. There was no protection for anyone from the Class
Ones. They did as they pleased; the rest got out of their
way or cleaned up after them. It had always bothered
him that things were the way they were, but lately it had
begun to prey on his mind, to distract him.

He was distracted when he came into the holding
that day, and four months was plenty of time to build
up recognizable patterns, unconscious bad habits that
could be fatal. Still, there was no excuse. Most of the
Prims were leaning or lounging against the wrappipe
that ran along the back wall of the holding. Normally,
he did not have to look at the crosspipes that carried ef-
fluent from the Upworld to reprocessing centers in the
Underpinning. They were too far away for a decent
leap, and only a rank amateur would have tried to at-
tack from there. So he didn’t look, and pain cracked
down on the side of his skull like Breakage & Havoc.

Everything after that was rage and reflex and only a
clever scuttle back under the crosspipes saved Strongar
from flushing. 'When the red splotches of pain went out
from in front of his eyes and settled in a dazzling scarlet
indentation on the side of his head, he thought he could
hear a whimper, but he was not sure. He hadn’t been
hit with a Flexible Threefoot since he was in training,
and he had forgotten what the flailing swingstick of the
Intimidators felt like.

He forced himself to walk steadily over to the arch-
wall and wondered if he was going to have to have the
bone replated again. He shook his head at his careless-
ness, but it was its own punishment, as he had warned

In the Lowerarchy of the Underpinning

them all so many times. He did not dignify the wound
by reaching up to touch it, but he knew he owed Stron-
gar some commendation. He leaned against the wall in
half-crouch, half-coil while the Prims ^at the back of the
holding pressed forward. It was half likely that they just
wanted to get a sniff at the blood, but they were moving
in shifting blurs that might have been an attack. They
were entitled.

Every Mindmaster who went into the Underpinning
took the chance that his charges would mutiny one day
and render him for flushing if he lost his footing with
them. And Strongar’s attack, even though T-Char’s retali-
ation had been swift and total, had been successful. He
could feel the side of his head pumping, and he tried to
clear his eyes.* Most of the Priifis were eyeing him cau-
tiously, trying to see if he was really hurt or just sucker-
ing them into a commitment they would regret.

The irregular gasps that came from under the cross-
pipes as Strongar fought for breath made them cautious,
but if he had succeeded in damaging the Mindmaster,
then the Mindmaster was free game. Still, they had seen
T-Char react, and none of them wanted to go squealy-
squealy under the crosspipes with Strongar. It left them
in a brief hesitation, and he knew that if he let them go
much longer without control they might be lost for good.

“Be wallbacked!” he said. His voice was low and stern,
as if he was merely calling for order rather than com-
manding a withdrawal of potential attackers. Two of the
older Prims shuffled restlessly just outside his defensive
perimeter, but the rest scattered even before he moved
a hand. The other two dove for their places on the flush-
pipe directly across from him when he moved. T-Char
smiled bitterly. He’d been sent there to teach them a
fear of authority, and he had apparently succeeded.

He shook a Prepack out of his sleeve and clapped it
on the wound. The Numbs went right to work, and the
Closers made a net between one side of the opening
and the other and then filled it in until it was a sheet of
tissue as resilient as skin. Any deep injury would have
to wait; if he left immediately, he would have to main
half his Recruitment when he tried to come back. There
was nothing to do except go on as if nothing was
wrong with him.

The first thing to do was deal with Strongar; he went
back over to the crosspipe. “YOU! Butnot! Crawl out!”

But the only answer was tiny gasps for air. “You! Crawl
out!” he demanded. “You whimperish lielow! Crawl out
and stand uplike!” There was a vague scratching like
someone trying to master enormous pain and crawl. If it
was a lure, it was a good one, and T-Char was tempted
to lie down and go in after him.

But there was no doing that. He would have to lie on
his stomach even to see under the crosspipe, and some
zealous Prim was bound to come down heels first onto
his spine, or try to. He’d had them long enough to earn
their respect, but they were far from trained, and a
Mindmaster’s ears were worth a lot of fisk. The throb-
bing dizziness that kept seeping from under the Numbs
like oozing blood wouldn’t let him take that chance.

There was a possibility that Strongar couldn ’t crawl

out; T-Char’s counterblows were all struck in the dark-
ness of pain, and he was not sure how much he’d held
back. But there was no way to go under and check. He
could only demand. “Crawl out, Butnot! No lowlying!
You screw, you due; come out and be Thumped.”

He expected immediate obedience. It was the second
lesson he had been sent to teach. Voluntary obedience
to authority, and submission to due punishment — if he
got that alone across, his job would have been consid-
ered successful. That he was able to take so many be-
yond that point to actual Redevelopment and even So-
cial Responsibility was to his great credit, but T-Char
considered it more to his credit that he had never lost
one who was worth anything. It bothered him that
Strongar did not crawl out. He waited impatiently, al-
most anxiously. There was still some scraping under the
pipes and a muffled whimper like internal screams leak-
ing outward through cracks in a great resolution.

It seemed to go on forever, and he wondered how
long he could wait before it was too late to do anything.
He reassured himself that Prims were strong-headed and
steel-boned all through, but it gave him no solace. His
reflexes were cued to deadly force, and he had not been
in control to soften them. There was a good chance the
Prim would die under there like a rat that couldn’t be
gotten out with a long stick.

The rest of the Prims were shifting restlessly, and he
knew he could not let them go unattended for long. Fi-
nally, he turned from the crosspipes and addressed the
loungers along the wall. “Pridey? What’s from this?”

He jerked his head toward the archway as if the at-
tack were still going on. The Prim lowered his eyes and
struggled to find some meaning in it he could get into
words. Strongar was quick and bright; he had the poten-
tial for articulation. Most of the others did not, except
Crawling, the youngest.

T-Char glanced around for him and found him perched
on top of the flowpipe with his head almost touching
the plasteel skin of the habitat.

“You screw, you due?” Pridey answered finally. T-Char
let it pass. If T-Char pressed the Prim, he might find out
he meant that T-Char was due his Bloody for not look-
ing sidewards, but he let it go without comment, and
Pridey slumped back into himself, content that there
were no blows coming and no ridicule. T-Char looked
sideways at the crosspipes. He could see fingers just in
the shade of the pipes, digging in to pull Strongar for-
ward, and he relaxed a little. Once Strongar crawled out,
he could smack him sleepy and put things in his body
back in place. Half the training of a Mindmaster was ma-
nipulations to undo the damage just inflicted.

He turned his attention to the flowpipe again. “Crawl-
ing, what does from this?” The youngster bounced once
or twice in his crouch, making dust break free and fall
from the insulation of the flowpipe. He seemed to con-
sider it the way T-Char would, measuring all its angles
before he made a decision. His eyes were bright with
insight. “Strongar’s arm longer, T-Char’s wind shorter.”

T-Char smiled. Crawling didn’t have the size to make
Intimidator, but he might leap right over that to Inter-

William John Watkins

rogator. That was a Class Two position; not many of
them ever made Class Two, but there was an ambiguity
to the answer a Class Two would have left. It could
have meant that either T-Char would be dead, with his
breath shortened to nothing, or it might have been a
comment that he would not have had to talk so much if
Strongar hadn’t missed his opportunity by centimeters.

It was the perfect answer for a Class Two: ambigu-
ous, witty, and to the point. T-Char nodded. The motion
seemed to separate the edges of his wound and crank
the rest of his skin up over his head. He looked toward
the crosspipe; a full arm was out, and he could see
Strongar’s eyes dimly just under the shadow of the pipes.
He was surprised at how much relief he felt.

He was in no professional jeopardy. If he lost a Prim,
the Lowerarchy had no complaints. Those he couldn’t
make into Functionals would be flushed anyway, and
they knew it. The first time they were caught in the Up-
world, they got the choice; the second time, they were
flushed. No trial. No appeal. No wastage. No trace. Any
of them who didn’t make it through Redevelopment
were dead meat. That was not what was bothering him;
he had plans for Strongar.

Strongar had the drive and a little flash that could
have amounted to something on some frontier world,
less strict and less sophisticated. Minimum, he expected,
was a hero’s funeral, maybe even Strongar’s picture in
the spinning Roll of Heroes in the middle of Style City.
But that was not what he had wanted.

He had been Honorable at too many ceremonies fctr
dead heroes not to want to see them come back. And
Strongar had had the best chance of any of them.

He pushed his mind away from such maudlinity. Un-
doubtedly he was getting too old for Redevelopment.
Such attachments were dangerous, sometimes fatal.

They made for weaknesses. He took his eyes off Crawl-
ing’s suppressed laughter and swung it to Dimmer.

Dimmer was more likely to be a flushee than any-
thing else. Even Redevelopment under T-Char was not
infallible. He had thought more than once about what
would have to be done with Dimmer to keep him from
disaster, but every time, he came to the conclusion that
there was little or nothing. Certainly, the threat of a stiff
kick kept him in line while T-Char might be around, but
T-Char went Upworld sometimes, and sooner or later
while he was gone, some Intimidator was going to catch
Dimmer bloodyfingered in the debris of some Class
One’s erotic fantasy and flush him.

Sometimes, he wondered why the damned Ones al-
ways had to have a Prim to play with. Left to their own
devices, even a ratlow like Dimmer would not choose
higher than a Two and suffer no worse than Bruising &
Bending if some irate co-partner came home early and
found him still glazed and steamy in his slickysack. He
brushed the resentment away. It was wrong to feel it
and more wrong to give it headroom. He ought to turn
himself in to the Headholder. But he knew he wouldn’t.
Not until it was too late and he did something dreadful
among the primey Ones.

He kept watching for Strongar to come out from the

corner of his eye. No doubt, a few manipulations and a
little Stinger, and the Prim would be up as rasty as ever.

Dimmer was still struggling for words and ideas to
put into them. It was long past time when T-Char should
have launched into some tirade about the stupidity of
Prims and stiffkicking some intelligence into them, but
everything seemed to be floating away from him. It oc-
curred to him that the cleft in his head was deeper than
he thought and that maybe some Numbs had seeped
into his graymatter itself. But that was dangerous think-
ing. A wound was only as deep as you made it. It was a
truism he had been teaching Prims for years. He turned
his mind away from such self-defeat.

His Prims were looking at him as if he’d been silent
far too long, and he tried to think what he’d been ask-
ing. It didn't matter; Dimmer never got the point anyway.
“Flush,” was all he said. It was all he ever said to Dim-
mer. It was both an insult and a prophecy of dciom. Even
Dimmer accepted it deep in the piping of his head. Soon-
er or later, later or sooner, he was dead meat waiting for
a blow to knock him over and strong hands to wrench
him in pieces and stuff him down the flushpipe. And
even Dimmer knew nobody would know or care he was
gone. The slickysqueeze he used to fondle would go
prancing back up to the glass crossrides between the tow-
ers of Style City without a backwards thought. Dimmer
looked down at his belt, at his motley collection of ears.

T-Char turned his head away slowly; it hurt anyway,
and the motion only seemed to leach the Numbs deeper
into his braincase. He took a quick step to the pipes and
stepped on Strongar’s hand. There was no response, but
it could be a clever fake. He leaned his back against the
crosspipe and reached under.

Strongar’s hair was sticky in his hand, and he jerked the
body out like a man opening a drawer from the side. He
knew it was bound for the flushpipe even before he
turned it over. The eyes were starey-starey, open to some-
thing beyond the low ceiling of piping, beyond even the
Upworld. But he had no idea what. He wasn’t even sure
there could be anything. Everything ran for the benefit
of the Upworld. How could there be anything beyond it?

T-Char looked at the Prims. “No leap without its land-
ing,” he said. It was tme of himself as well, and he knew
it. He was getting old and full of mistakes. He even made
the mistake of looking into Strongar’s eyes. It was bad
luck, very bad. He kicked the lid off the flu.shpipe and
began breaking the joints to make the body fit. The ex-
ertion made him dizzier and he started to fall forward.

He thought he caught himself, but he was wrong.

He was only barely aware of the consequences. He
could hear the flow rushing through the flushpipes low-
er down; everything emptied into something lower, ev-
erything drained inward. He barely felt the blows. He
shouldn’t have felt any. The first should have finished
him, and at least Crawling should have done it right. It
was just as well, he decided. He was too old for it ail
anyway. They started to break him for flushing even be-
fore he was starey-starey, but that didn’t matter either.

Fie wondered whose belt his ears would hang fktm. He
hoped it wouldn’t be Dimmer’s.

In the Lowerarchy of the Underpinning

The Winters of the World

Stephen L. Gillett

North America and northern Europe
buried under ice sheets kilometers
thick . . .

The Mississippi swollen to a mega-
Amazon, draining a continent’s worth
of meltwater . . .

Vast meltwater lakes like inland
seas, flanking the great icecaps like
frigid gems . . .

As all AMAZING® Stories readers
know, ice has chugged down from
the poles several times in the recent
geologic past, during the Pleistocene
epoch, when our ancestors chased
the mammoths and aurochs through
northern Eurasia and North America.

The cause of the ice sheets’ wax-
ing and waning has been more
problematic, though, and has in-
spired speculation and controversy
since the Ice Ages’ reality was estab-
lished by geologists in the late 19th
century. Did the Sun sputter and the
Earth cool? Or did climate change
for some unknown, but Earth-based,
reason? Or even more glamorously
(and speculatively): maybe the whole
Earth tipped abruptly on its axis?

Well, we’re still not completely
sure, but it looks as though small
periodic variations in the Earth’s or-
bit — the “Milankovich variations” —
are the explanation. Milankovich, a
Yugoslav astronomer, showed that
these variations cause small but con-
sistent changes in the average amount
of sunlight (“insolation”) that high
latitudes receive.

What are these variations? A cou-
ple come from the precession of the
equinoxes, the slow change in the

direction that the Earth’s axis tilts.
“Precession” is a rotation of the axis
of something that’s spinning around,
just like a wobbling top that’s about
to fall over. Over about 25,000 years,
the Earth’s axis makes one such com-
plete wobble, and climatic periods
of about 19 and 23 thousand years
are associated with this precession.
(They’re not exactly 25,000 years be-
cause of the way the precession pe-
riod combines with other periods.)

Another cycle is in the very tilt of
Earth’s axis — its “obliquity,” which
varies from about 22 to 25 degrees
over about 41,000 years. (It’s now
23.5 degrees.) Finally, the eccentrici-
ty of the Earth’s orbit (how much it
differs from a circle) changes slight-
ly, with a period of around 100,000
years.

Now, these variations are only
roughly cyclic. They result from the
sum of lots and lots of different as-
tronomical periods, from the gravita-
tional tugs of all the other planets
on the Earth. So, the variations them-
selves vary in period as you get too
far away from the present, say more
than a million years or so.

The Milankovich variations were
ignored for decades because they
seemed too small to make any dif-
ference in climate. At their most ex-
treme they cause a change of a few
percent in the intensity of sunlight.
But as geologists and oceanogra-
phers got better and better dates on
the glacial periods, and the times of
high sea level during the inter-
glacials, they found that these dates

fitted very well with the Milankovich
cycles.

Climate is so finely balanced right
now that even changes of a few per-
cent in insolation have large effects.
How can this happen?

Through positive feedbacks. For
one example, what you need to start
a glacial age is not frigid winters but
lots of snow. And also cool summers,
so the snow won’t melt. You need
to accumulate snow to make ice, and
to do that you need to preserve it
over the summer. Once that happens,
a positive feedback sets in: snow is
white and thus reflects sunlight,
which tends to cool things yet more,
so more snow accumulates. . . .

Before long you’ve covered most
of a continent with ice.

During an interglacial stage, on
the other hand, the ice retreats to its
fortresses in Greenland and Antarcti-
ca. Once climate kicks over into an
interglacial, some sort of feedback
must exist to accelerate the melting,
but the mechanism is still debated.
Of course, we’re in an interglacial
right now, but in 5,000 years or so it
will get colder again; and after a
warmer respite in about 15,000
years, the glaciers will return in ear-
nest in 60,000 years or so. (Poul An-
derson wrote a book set during the
next glaciation, The Winter of the
World, from which I took — with his
permission — the title of this column.)

Lots of things are different during
a glacial stage. It’s easy to see why
vast lakes formed along the edge of
the ice sheets, from the melting wa-

ter. For a time, for example, glacial
Lake Agassiz covered much of inte-
rior North America, spilling off to
the south through the Mississippi
Valley. It was finally drained by the
glaciers’ retreat, which opened a
new northeasterly path out the val-
ley of the St. Lawrence.

In the northwestern U.S., one
such meltwater lake, glacial Lake
Missoula, yielded the largest floods
ever documented. Lake Missoula,
named for a town in western Mon-
tana where the lake stood almost
1,000 feet deep, was bounded to the
north by the main ice sheet and
stretched for tens of miles southeast-
erly through the valleys of western
Montana. To the west, it was dammed
by a tongue of the main ice sheet,
which poked down to choke off the
natural drainage along the Pend
Oreille (pond oh-ray) valley in the
Idaho panhandle.

Now, ice is a terrible material for
a dam: it floats! So as Lake Missoula
filled with meltwater, every century
or so, its ice dam would start to float,
and would then fail catastrophically.
Cubic miles of water then spilled
into the Columbia River drainage,
sloshing over western Washington
state with results like taking a fire-
hose to a sand castle. The depth of
water, and its velocity, made unique
land forms: giant ripple marks, for
example, which in aerial photos look
like those on the bottom of a brook
— until you realize the scale of the
marks by comparing them with the
highways crossing them. Each ripple
is over 20 feet high and hundreds of
feet long. The floods scoured out gi-
ant channels (“coulees”) in a matter
of hours, and flushed away topsoil
down to bedrock, leaving a “scab-
land” of plucked and barren rock.
(To this day, the main channels fol-
lowed by the floodwaters are promi-
nent in orbital photos.) Vast ponds
— lakes, really — temporarily formed
at bottlenecks, and sediment laid
down by these lakes extends hun-
dreds of kilometers up side streams,
such as the Willamette (wil-Zaw-met)
River in Oregon.

These were the Spokane floods,
named from the city of Spokane
Ispo-kan), Washington, whose mod-
ern site lay in their path. Geologists

have adopted a marvelous Icelandic
word, “jokulhlaup” (veiy approxi-
mately, ycr-kul-hloip), for a flood re-
leased by the periodic failure of a
glacial ice dam. Similar floods occur
today in Iceland on a much smaller
scale. The Spokane floods are the
largest jokulhlaups known. About 40
separate floods happened: after Lake
Missoula drained in a matter of days,
the tongue pushing down from the
main glacier to the north would re-
establish the ice dam, and the cycle
would repeat.

Quite apart from such spectacular
but rare effects, glaciation deranges
the topography, because moving ice
doesn't shape the land like moving
water does. Glaciers leave behind
closed basins, as they scoop out soft-
er places in the rock. These fill up
and become lakes after the ice is
gone. The “10,000 lakes” in Minne-
sota, not to mention the zillions of
lakes and bogs to the north in Cana-
da, and the Finger Lakes in New York,
are one result. Glaciers also leave
behind piles of dirt (“moraines”) bull-
dozed before them. (Long Island is
one.) These consist of completely un-
sorted debris, boulders and sand and
silt mixed haphazardly together. Run-
ning water, by contrast, sons materi-
al efficiently; it moves silt and sand
much more easily than boulders!

During the glacial maxima the cli-
mate also became cooler farther
south, and rainfall patterns changed
greatly. In the Great Basin of the
mountain West, for example, two
vast lakes. Lake Bonneville and Lake
Lahontan, covered most of western
Utah and western Nevada, respec-
tively. Many smaller lakes also filled
valleys between these major lakes.

This was the so-called “pluvial”
(from the Latin word for rain) peri-
od, which corresponded closely
with the time of the great glaciers to
the north. Great Salt Lake in Utah is
a shrunken relic of Lake Bonneville,
and several smaller lakes in Nevada
(such as Walker and Pyramid),
perched improbably way out in the
desert, are all that’s left of Lake La-
hontan. Not too far from where I
live is the “40 mile desert,” a sere,
waterless stretch — bleak even to a
desert rat like me — where California-
bound wagon trains staggered along

in the last century. Ironically, most
of this route lay under Lake Lahon-
tan 15,000 years ago: ancient shore-
lines left by the lake now stripe the
desert hills with parallel lines like
ruled paper, hundreds of feet above
the dry valley floor.

Cooler climate seems reasonable
during an ice age — after all, the
northern part of the continent was
covered with ice — but there’s actual-
ly a more subtle cause for the en-
hanced rainfall: the high, cold pla-
teau of ice in the north forced the jet
streams southward. As you all know
from the evening weather report, the
jet streams tend to bring storms along,
so all the Pacific storms that now
flow into the Pacific Northwest and
British Columbia went toward Neva-
da instead. Much of the moisture
was wrung from them by the Sierra
Nevada, and north-south mountain
ranges to the east snagged more
rainfall. Runoff from the mountains
then filled the lake basins.

The climate, it turns out, was not
all that much cooler. The vegetation
during the pluvial periods was pretty
much the same as you find in the
Great Basin today. Sagebrush ringed
Lake Lahontan, as it does its basin
today. The main effect creating the
gigantic lakes was the increased
rainfall in the mountains.

By the way, the Pluvial Age Great
Basin, with its vast lakes and intri-
cate shorelines, would be a good
setting for an SF story. It’s every bit
as exotic as the dry Mediterranean,
an SF standby, and it’s much better
documented.

The waxing and waning of glacial
ice also causes sea level to vary over
hundreds of meters, as massive
amounts of water are locked into ice
and then released again. Obviously
this changes the shape of the conti-
nents. But there’s a more subtle re-
sult: the intricate, convoluted shore-
lines we take as “normal” on the
modern coastline. Look at the ea.st-
ern seaboard of the U.S., for exam-
ple, with its innumerable estuaries,
offshore islands, bars, and spits.

They resulted from the rise in sea
level 10,000 years ago when the
glaciers melted. River mouths were
drowned, and longshore currents
began to build bars and spits across

The Winters of the World

the inlets. Over time, the shoreline
will smooth out, as the rivers fill in
the estuaries from behind and the
bars wall them off from the sea. (Es-
tuaries, of course, are highly produc-
tive ecosystems, but Mother Nature
destroys wetlands too! She just takes
a bit longer.)

The weight of all that ice also
slowly pushes down the crust. Hud-
son Bay in North America, and the
Baltic Sea in northern Europe, are
shallow depressions left behind from
the weight of the ice. Now that the
ice is gone, the land is slowly rising,
like a thumbprint in warm wax. Hud-
son Bay is ringed by old shorelines,
left behind as the land rises again.
Similarly, in the Baltic, some sea-
mounts have become islands in liv-
ing memory. But it’s only been
10,000 years or so since the ice melt-
ed, and both depressions have lots
of rising still to do.

This leisurely pop-back of the
cmst is called “isostatic rebound.”
Geophysicists use the rate of re-
bound to esimate how viscous the
Earth’s crust and mantle are, which
are useful data for calculating things
like how fast continental drift can
take place.

The depression of the crust by a
continental ice sheet would be a
problem, by the way, if you were to
melt off the Greenland and Antarctic
icecaps to try to get new land. Not
only would the meltwater flood low-
lying parts of the continents else-
where, but great tracts of the crust in
Greenland and Antarctica have been
pushed below sea level by the weight
of the ice. You’ll have to wait a hun-
dred thousand years or so for Ant-
arctica and Greenland to pop back
above sea level.

The Milankovich variations are not
the whole story, not by a long shot.
In a very real sense we’re still in an
ice age, right now, because there are
polar icecaps. All that happens dur-
ing the Milankovich glacial maxima
is that the caps get bigger. But dur-
ing most of geologic history, there
have been no polar icecaps at all.

So what’s happened? Is the Earth
cooling off? Can we look forward to
nothing but grimmer and grimmer
winters in the geologic ages to come?

Hardly. Note I said “most,” not
“all.” Ice has invaded from the poles
at other times in Earth’s past, too.

The earliest glaciation we have frag-
mentary evidence for in the geologic
record happened about 2.5 billion
years ago. There also was extensive
glaciation in the late Precambrian,
around 700-800 million years ago.
Northern Africa, site of the present
Sahara Desert, hosted a continental
glaciation during the Ordovician pe-
riod, about 400 million years ago.
Records of a late Paleozoic glacia-
tion, about 200 million years ago,
are found on the fragments — South
America, Africa, India, Australia,
Antarctica — of the ancient supercon-
tinent of Gondwanaland, which be-
gan to splinter about 120 million
years ago. The Pleistocene-Present is
only the most recent glacial age.

What makes such glacial ages?
Now that we know about continen-
tal drift, we can understand them in
general: if the continents are so ar-
ranged that surface seawater can cir-
culate freely between the equator
and the poles, climate will be more
equable over the globe and polar
ice won’t exist. Eor example, the Ant-
arctic glaciation seems to have start-
ed — suddenly, as geologic events go
— in the Miocene, about 25 million
years ago. Continental drift had sep-
arated Australia and Antarctica, and
as Antarctica slid inexorably toward
the pole, the island continent was fi-
nally isolated by breaching of an is-
land bridge to South America. This
let the circum-Antarctic current be-
come established, so that the cold
surface water could stay in the Ant-
arctic and stay cold. (Before, the cur-
rents were pushed northward by col-
lision with the island bridge, so they
mixed with warmer water.) Then,
once the glaciers started forming, the
feedback started in earnest, and An-
tartica was ice-covered before long.

By contrast, when wide shallow
seas covered much of the Earth, as
during the Cretaceous period, about
80 million years ago, or when the
continents were distributed along
the equator, as in the Cambrian pe-
riod, about 550 million years ago,
the surface water could circulate
freely and thus was warm clear to
the poles.

An age with icecaps, like the pre-
sent, also has profound effects on
the rest of the Earth; effects that go
beyond the climate.

One such is on the deep circula-
tion of the oceans; not just the sur-
face circulation we’ve been talking
about, but the interchange between
deep and shallow water. When ice-
caps exist, cold polar water drives
this circulation. It sinks and flows to-
ward the equator; in return, warm
surface water flows toward the
poles. Thus, except for a thin sur-
face layer in the tropics, the modern
ocean is cold clear through. It is also
oxygenated clear through, because
cold water can hold lots more air in
solution than warm water.

But what happens when there’s
no cold water to sink? The warm
equatorial surface water sinks in-
stead. Sure, being warm, it tends to
expand and thus decrease its densi-
ty; but it has also lost water to the
air from evaporation. That leaves
salts behind, which makes the sur-
face seawater a bit more saline; and
the extra salinity is what makes it
sink. We have a modern analog of
this situation: the Mediterranean.

The Med doesn’t receive enough
water from the rivers draining into it
to replenish evaporation, so its sur-
face waters get saline enough to sink,
and a warm saline current flows at
depth out the Strait of Gibraltar.

Such “warm saline bottom water”
also is anoxic, since warm water
holds little air in solution. No higher
life forms can live in such an ocean;
only anaerobic microbes exist, and
lots of organic matter accumulates in
the sediment — a big difference from
the modern seas! The black shales
so abundant in parts of the geologic
record result from such organic-rich
deposition. A modern, small-scale
model of such an ocean is the Black
Sea. The Bosporus is much too shal-
low to allow deep circulation with
the Med, and obviously the Black
Sea receives no cold polar water to
drive its circulation. So below a thin
surface layer with a normal marine
fauna, the Black Sea is anoxic.

Earlier I talked about the derang-
ment of topography that glaciers
cause. Even more: they’re massive
erosion machines. A continental

Stephen L. Gillett

glacier is a continental bulldozer,
scraping off gigatons of rock. The
great “shield” areas of the conti-
nents, where all younger rock has
been eroded off to show ancient,
contorted igneous and metamorphic
rocks, are probably created by gla-
ciations. The outlines of the Canadi-
an Shield in North America and the
Fennoscandian Shield of northern
Europe both correspond well with
the positions of the ice sheets.

An even more bizarre possibility
is suggested by some fragmentary
data that indicate the late Precambri-
an glaciation extended into very low
latitudes. The obvious inference is
that the globe was almost covered
with ice, so that glaciers went almost
to the equator. But there’s another
possibility: if the tilt of the Earth’s
axis were much greater, the equator
might be a better place to grow gla-
ciers than the poles. Sure, each year
the poles would get six months of
intense winter, but that would be fol-
lowed by six months of intense sum-
mer — making it hard to preserve the
snow. By contrast, the equator stays
much cooler year round. However,
we don’t know yet whether the late
Precambrian glaciation was just con-
fined to the equator, so we don’t yet
know which possibility is correct.

If the Earth were completely cov-
ered with ice — and no other effects
intervened — the ice wouldn’t melt,
because the Earth’s reflectivity (“al-
bedo”) is then so high. Climatologists
used to worry about “runaway glacia-
tion,” when the Earth would freeze
over permanently. It now looks as
though the freeze-over would not be
permanent because other effects
would intervene. With no oceans,
carbon dioxide from volcanic activi-
ty would accumulate in the air, in-
creasing the greenhouse effect until
the ice melted again. A “greenhouse
effect,” of course, is the trapping of
solar heat through absorption by
certain molecules in the atmosphere.

Glaciers in the Sahara; deep lakes
covering most of Nevada; a clement
Antarctica and an anoxic ocean; these
show strikingly the variety and yet
the unity of an entire world. At such
times in its past, our own Earth has
been a good deal less Earthlike than
many authors’ “alien” planets!

About the

In addition to being the co-authors
of this issue’s leadoff story, Michael
Swanwick and Tim Sullivan have
at least one other significant accom-
plishment in common: Their first
published stories appeared in the
New Dimensions anthology series a
little more than a decade ago. The
story here, “Fantasies,” represents a
new dimension in fiction for this
magazine . . . which, all things con-
sidered, is rather fitting.

Michael’s latest novel is Stations
of the Tide, which was reviewed in
our May issue; a collection of his
shorter work. Gravity’s Angels, will
be out by the time you read this.
Tim’s most recent book is The Mar-
tian Viking; he has edited one an-
thology of horror fiction and is
working on a second one, entitled
Cold Shocks.

AMAZING® Stories got the career of
R. Garcia y Robertson off to a fly-
ing start when “The Flying Moun-
tain” appeared in May 1987. “Plague
Ship” is his sixth story for this maga-
zine, which makes him the “veteran”
on this issue’s roster of writers. His
first novel. The Spiral Dance, is due
out in October.

Among Rob Chilson’s many pub-
lished works is one earlier appear-
ance in this magazine — “Primitives,”
a collaboration with Robin Bailey
that appeared in July 1987. “I hasten
to add,” Rob hastens to add, “that it
was Robin’s original stoiy and he
deserves most of the credit.” Okay,
Rob . . . but the credit for “Logos”
belongs entirely to you.

Depending on how you look at it,
George Zebrowskl is either tied
with R. Garcia y Robertson for most
previous appearances in this maga-
zine, or else he’s a very close sec-
ond. “The Number of the Sand” is
George’s fifth story for us but marks
the sixth time his name has been on
top of a piece of fiction — because
an extensive excerpt from his new
book. Stranger Suns, was serialized
in the January 1991 and March 1991
issues.

Authors

It wasn’t until after we accepted his
manuscript for publication that Gary
Herring told us that “Dad was in
NASA during the glory days, and we
moved around the South a great
deal.” In retrospect, that information
doesn’t really come as a surprise —
who else but a “rocket brat” could
have written a story like “Fireballing”?
It is Gary’s third published piece of
short fiction, and his first appear-
ance in this magazine.

John Maxstadt has a long list of
writing credits, but considers “The
Glory of War” his first publication of
“official fiction.” Most of his earlier
work consists of articles and essays
on role-playing games that have ap-
peared in DRAGON® Magazine. Sev-
eral of those pieces were humorous
. . . something that this piece of “of-
ficial fiction” definitely is not.

In a career that covers twenty-six
years, William John Watkins has

published just about everything but
his grocery list: novels, poems, short
stories, and plays. His first science
fiction short story appeared in the
June 1974 issue of If. His most re-
cent, “In the Lowerarchy of the Un-
derpinning,” is also his debut in
AMAZING Stories.

It’s tough to figure out what we can
say about Robert SUverberg that
hasn’t been said before, but that’s a
problem we’ll cope with anytime as
long as he keeps providing us with
stories. For those of you who can’t
get enough of his work. The Face of
the Waters will be out in November
as a hardcover from Bantam Spectra.
And for those of you who would
rather not wait until November, the
back of this magazine contains a
novella-length story taken from the
early part of the novel. Meet the in-
habitants of Sorve Island, get to
know them a little . . . and when
you’re done reading, you'll realize
that — just like the characters them-
selves — ^you’ve really only just got-
ten to the beginning of the story.

The Winters of the World

Looking Forward:

The Rowan

by Anne McCaffrey

Coming in September 1 99 1 from Ace Books

fHE

THRILLING NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER

AUTHOR OF THE RENEGADES OF PERN

Cover art by Romas

Introduction by Bill Fawcett

Although she is best known for her Pern series,
all of Anne McCaffrey’s novels feature fascinat-
ing worlds on which live deep, realistic char-
acters. In The Rowan we meet one of her most
vividly portrayed heroines.

After being orphaned at birth, the Rowan is
quickly identified as one of the most powerful
psychics on any of the inhabited planets. The
story includes a lot of detail about her child-
hood, which enables the reader to understand
and empathize with the Rowan after she at-
tains adulthood and faces a wide range of
challenges and dangers.

The following excerpt is taken from the
point in the story after the Rowan has assumed
her duties. As the Prime for her world, she
maintains contact with psychics on other plan-
ets. Here, the Rowan is launching a number of
interstellar parcels when she first encounters a
newcomer to the elite group of psychics.

One of the ground crew toggled the yellow
alert across the board, then red as ten tonnes
of cargo from Earth settled on the Priority Re-
ceiving cradle. The waybill said Deneb VIII, one
of the newest colonies, which was at the Row-
an’s limit. But the shipment was marked TOP
EMERGENCY PRIORITY/ABSOLUTELY ESSENTIAL
with lavish MED seals and stencils shouting
“caution.” The waybill described the shipment
as antibodies for a virulent plague and speci-
fied direct transmission.

Well, where ’re my coordinates and my
placement photo? snapped the Rowan. / can ’t
thrust blind, you know, and we’ve always re-
routed for Deneb Vlll.

Bill Powers was scrolling through the Star-
dex which the Rowan suddenly tripped into a
fast forward, the appropriate fax appearing on
all screens at once.

Glor-ree! Do I have to land all that mass there myself?

No, Lamebrain, I’ll pick it up at 24.578.82, the lazy
rich baritone voice drawled in every mind, that nice lit-
tle convenient black dwarf midway. You won ’t need to
strain a single neuron in your pretty little skull.

The silence was deafening.

Well, I’ll be .. . came from the Rowan.

Of course, you are, sweetheart— just push that nice lit-
tle package out my way.. Or is it too much for you? The
drawl was solicitous rather than insulting.

You’ll get your package! replied the Rowan, and the
dynamos keened piercingly just once as the ten tonnes
disappeared out of the cradle.

Why, you little minx . . . slow it down or I’ll bum your
ears back!

Come out and catch it! The Rowan’s laugh broke off
in a gasp of surprise, and Ackerman could feel her slam-
ming up her mental shields.

/ want that stuff in one piece, not smeared a millime-
ter thin on the surface, my dear, the voice said sternly.
Okay. I’ve got it. Thanks! We need this.

Hey, who the blazes are you? What’s your placement?

Deneh VIII, my dear, and a busy boy right now. Ta-ta.

The silence was broken only by the whine of the dy-
namos dying to an idle burr.

Not a hint of what the Rowan was thinking came
through now, but Ackerman could pick up the aura of
incredulity, shock, speculation, and satisfaction that per-
vaded the thoughts of everyone else in the Station. What
a stunner for the Rowan! No one except a T-1 could have
projected that far. There’d been no mention of a new T-1
being contracted to FT&T, and, as far as Ackerman knew,
FT&T had the irreversible first choice on T-1 kinetics.

Another yellow flag came up for the Altair hurdle and
the waybill designated LIVE SHIPMENT TO BETELGEUSE.
The dynamos whined noisily and then the launcher was
empty. Whatever might be going through her mind at
the moment, the Rowan was doing her work.

All told, it was an odd day, and Ackerman didn’t know
whether to be thankful or not that the Rowan wasn’t leak-
ing any aggravation. She spun the day’s lot in and out
with careless ease. By the time Jupiter’s bulk had moved
around to blanket the out-system traffic, Callisto’s day
was nearly over and the Rowan wasn’t off power as
much as decibel one. Once the in-Sun traffic had filled
all available cradles, Ackerman wound down the system.
The computer banks darkened and dynamos fell silent
. . . but the Rowan did not come down out of her Tower.

Ray Loftus and Afra, the Capellan T-4, came over to
sit on the edge of Ackerman’s desk. They brought out
the bottle of some home brew and passed it around.

“I was going to ask her Highness to give me a lift
home,” Loftus said, “but I dunno now. Got a date with — ”

He disappeared. A moment later, Ackerman could
see him near a personnel carrier. Not only had he been
set down gently, but various small necessities, including
a flight bag, floated out of nowhere onto a neat pile in
the carrier. Ray was given time to settle himself before
the hatch sealed and he was whisked off.

Powers joined Afra and Ackerman.

“She’s sure in a funny mood,” he said.

When the Rowan got peevish, few of the men at the
station asked her to transport them to Earth. She was
psychologically planetbound, and resented the fact that
lesser talents could be moved about through space with-
out suffering a twinge of shock.

Ackerman and Powers exchanged looks which they
hastily suppressed as the Rowan appeared before them,
smiling. It was the first time that welcome and charming
expression had crossed her face for two weeks.

The grin made you realize, Ackerman thought, very
very softly in the deepest part of his brain, what a lovely
woman she could be. She was slight, thin rather than
slender and sometimes moved like an animated stick
figure. She was not his notion of “feminine” — all angles
and slight breasts — and yet, sometimes when she looked
up at you out of the corner of her eyes, that slight smile
tugging at the corner of a rather sensual mouth, she fair
took a guy’s breath away . . . wondering. And thinking
about things no married man — or T-9 — had any busi-
ness reviewing, even in his head.

She smiled now, not sly but watchful, and said noth-
ing. She took a pull from the bottle, made a grimace,
and handed it back with a thank-you. For all her eccen-
tricities, the Rowan acted with propriety face-to-face.

“Heard any ’scut about our Denebian friend?” she
asked with just the right degree of “casual” in her voice.

Ackerman shook his head. “Those planets are three
generations colonized, and you came out of Altair in two.”

“That could explain it, but FT&T hasn’t even projected
a station for Deneb. They’re still trying to find Talents
for closer systems.”

“And not for want of trying,” Afra said.

“"Wild Talent?” Powers helpfully suggested.

“At a Prime level? Unlikely.” She shook her head. “All
I can get from Center is that they received an urgent mes-
sage from an inbound merchantman to help combat a
planet-wide virus, including a rundown on the syndrome
and symptoms. Lab came up with a semm, batched, and
packed it. They were assured that there was someone
capable of picking it up and taking it the rest of the way
past 24.578.82 if a Prime would get it that far. Prior to this
morning, what little goes to Deneb has been sent by the
cargo drone or rerouted. And that’s all anybody knows.”
Then she added thoughtfully, “Deneb VIII isn’t a very
big colony.”

Oh, we’re hig enough, sweetheart, intermpted the
drawling voice. Sorry to get you after hours, my dear, but
I don ’t really know anyone else to tag on Earth and I
heard you coloring your atmosphere.

What’s wrong? the Rowan asked. Did you smear your
serum after all that proud talk?

Smear it, hell! I’ve been drinking it. No, lovey. We’ve
just discovered that we got some ET visitors who think
they’re exterminators. We got a reading on three UFOs,
perched four thousand miles above us. That batch of
semm you wafted out to me this morning was for the
sixth vims we’ve been socked with in the last two weeks,
so there ’re no bets on coincidence. Someone’s trying to
kill us off. You can practically time the onset of a new

The Rowan

nasty by the digital. We’ve lost twenty-five percent of our
population already and this last virus is a beaut. I want
two top germdogs out here on the double and say, two
naval squadrons. I doubt our friends will hover about vi-
ral dusting much longer. They’ve softened us up plenty.
They’re moving in now and once they get in position,
they’ll start blowing holes in us real soon. So send the
word along to Fleet Fleadquarters, will you, sweetheart,
to mobilize us a heavy-duty retaliation fleet?

I’ll relay, naturally. But why didn’t you contact direct?

Contact whom? What? I don ’t know your Terran orga-
nization. You ’re the only one I can hear.

Not for much longer if I know my bosses.

You may know your bosses, but you don’t know me.

That can always be arranged.

This is no time for flirting. Get that message through
for me like a good girl.

Which message?

The one I just gave you.

That old one? They say you can have two germdogs in
the morning as soon as we clear Jupiter. But Earth says
no squadrons. No armed attack.

You can double-talk, too, huh? You ’re talented. But
the morning does us no good. NOW is when we need
them. We’ve got to have as many healthy bodies as possi-
ble. Can’t you sling the medics . . . no, you can’t, can
you, not with Jupiter’s mass in the way. Sorry, I just
found the data on your station. Filed under Miscella-
neous Space Installations. But, look, if six viruses don ’t
constitute armed attack, what does?

Missiles constitute armed attack, the Rowan said primly.

Frankly, missiles would be preferable. Them I can see.

I need those germdogs NOW. Can’t you turn your sweet
little mind to a solution?

As you mentioned, it’s after hours.

By the Horsehead, woman! The drawl was replaced
by a cutting mental roar. My family, my friends, my
planet are dying.

Look, after hours here means we’re behind Jupiter. But
. . . wait! How deep is your range?

I don ’t honestly know. And the firm mental tone lost
some of its assurance.

“Ackerman!” The Rowan turned to her stationmaster.

“I’ve been listening.”

Hang on, Deneb, I’ve got an idea. I can deliver your
germdogs. Open to me in half an hour.

The Rowan whirled on Ackerman. “I want my shell.”
Her eyes were flashing and her face was alight. “Afra!”

The station’s second in command, the handsome yel-
low-eyed Capellan T-4, raised himself from the chair in
which he’d been quietly watching her.

“Yes, Rowan?”

She glanced to the men in the room, bathing each in
the miraculous smile that so disconcerted Ackerman
with its sensuality.

“I’ll need all of you to help me. I’ll have to be
launched, slowly, over Jupiter’s curve,” she said to Afra.
Ackerman was already switching on the dynamos, and
Bill Powers punched for her special shell to be deposit-
ed on the launch rack.

As soon as she saw the capsule settle in the rack, she
took another deep breath and disappeared from the Sta-
tion, to reappear behind the conveyance. She settled
gracefully into the shock couch. The moment the lock
whistle shut off, she “knew” that Afra was lifting her,
gently, gently away from Callisto. Only when the shell
had swung into position over Jupiter’s great curve did
she reply to the priority call coming from Earth Central.

Now what the billy blue blazes are you doing. Rowan?
Reidinger’s base voice crackled in her skull.

She’s doing us a favor, Deneb said, joining them.

Who’n hell are you? demanded Reidinger. Then, in
shocked surprise, Deneb? How’d you get out there?

Wishful thinking. Hey, push those germdogs to my
pretty friend here, huh?

You ’re going a little too far, Deneb. You can ’t bum
out my best Prime with an unbased send like this.

I’ll pick up midway. Like the antibiotics this morning.

Deneb, what’s this business with antibiotics and germ-
dogs? What’re you cooking up out there in that heathen-
ish hole?

Oh, we’re merely fighting a few plagues with one hand
and keeping three bogey ETs upstairs. Deneb gave them
a look with his vision at an enormous hospital, a contin-
uous stream of airborne ambulances coming in; at crowd-
ed wards, grim-faced nurses and doctors, and uncom-
fortably high piles of still, shrouded figures. That melded
into a proximity screen showing the array of blips on an
orbital hold. We haven ’t had the time or the technology
to run IDs but our Security Chief says they’re nothing he’s
seen before.

Well, I didn’t realize. All right, you can have anything
you want — within reason. But I want a full report, said
Reidinger.

And patrol squadrons?

Reidinger’s tone changed to impatience. You’ve obvi-
ously got an exaggerated idea of FT&T’s influence. We’re
mailmen, not military. I’ve no authority to mobilize patrol
squadrons like that! There was a mental snap of fingers.

Would you perhaps drop a little word in the appropri-
ate ear? Those ETs may gobble Deneb tonight and go after
Terra tomorrow.

I’m filing a report, of course, but you colonists agreed
to the risks when you signed up!

You’re all heart, said Deneb.

Reidinger was silent for a moment. Then he said,
Germdogs sealed. Rowan. Pick ’em up and throw ’em
out, and his touch left them.

Rowan — that’s a pretty name, said Deneb.

Thanks, she said absently. She had followed along
Reidinger’s initial push, and picked up the two person-
nel carriers as they materialized beside her shell. She
pressed into the station dynamos and gathered strength.
The generators whined and she pushed out. The carriers
disappeared.

They’re coming in. Rowan. Thanks a lot.

A passionate and tender kiss was blown to her across
the intervening light-years of space. She tried to follow
after the carriers and pick up his touch again, but he
was no longer receiving.

Anne McCaffrey

Looking Forward:

Tatham Mound

by Piers Anthony

Coming in September 1991

from William Morrow & Company

Introduction by Bill Fawcett

When some people hear that a book is
about American Indians and is accurate
in detail, they tend to suspect — recall-
ing experiences with grade-school text-
books — that it might be boring or child-
ish. That’s definitely not true of Tatham
Mound. If you’ve liked Piers Anthony’s
other books, you’ll enjoy this one just
as much. The novel is a wonderfully
well crafted weave of constant action,
spirit magic, and very real characters.

The book depicts the world of the
Tocobaga Indians through the eyes of
Throat Shot — who was named for an
incident that occurred on his manhood
raid, when he was still being called
Hotfoot. After Hotfoot and his friends
carefully plan each step, the raid begins
. . . and then things start to go wrong.

Hotfoot lifted the point and loosed his
arrow at point-blank range. It happened
before he realized it was going to. It
was as if his arms and hands belonged
to someone else, someone with twice
the nerve he could ever have. The ar-
row passed through the warrior’s neck.
The man did not cry out; he could not,
for it was his voice the arrow had trans-
fixed. He simply collapsed, looking
surprised.

“I never saw a neater kill!” Wood-
pecker breathed, awed. “No sound at
all!” He was speaking of animal kills, of
course; none of them had seen a war-
rior die in battle before.

Hotfoot did not answer. He was
stunned. He had killed squirrels and
rabbits, and was reckoned to have a
good arm for the bow. But this was a

Cover art by Jerry Lofaro; cover design by Jesse Cohen

Text of excerpt copyright 01991 Piers Anthony

man\ He had known this was no game excursion they
were on, but still had not until this moment appreciated
the full seriousness of it.

“Take his scalp!” Alligator said.

Hotfoot just stared at the dead man, making no move.
The death of a man!

“We must run,” Woodpecker whispered. “They’ll find
him soon. No time for the scalp.”

They moved out, silently, into the closing dusk. But
Hotfoot was in a kind of trance, seeing only that war-
rior, the arrow through his neck, his eyes widening as
he sank down. There was no glory in this kill, only hor-
ror. Why couldn’t he have missed, as Alligator had, or
hit the shoulder, as Woodpecker had?

Because the man would have cried out, and attacked
them, and then they would have had to try to kill him
more messily, and if they had succeeded, by that time
the other Gale would have been there, and that would
have been all. He had had to do it; he knew that. Yet
still he was appalled.

In this numbed time of flight and thought. Hotfoot
knew that he was no warrior. Woodpecker had covered
for him, giving him a pretext not to take the scalp, though
of course he should have. None of them had experience
in cutting heads; they would have bungled it, and in-
deed, they had no time. But it was more than that. Hot-
foot knew with absolute certainty that he never wanted
to kill again. That was why he was no warrior.

They gained distance, because the Gale did not at
first discover the death of their warrior. They assumed
that no outcry meant no discovery, so the rest were still
searching their own sections of the closing net. That was
good fortune for the raiders, for every moment that
passed now made escape more likely.

Now they heard the outcry behind as the Gale discov-
ered the slain warrior. But the night was near; as long as
they kept quiet, they were safe.

The problem was that the same factors that inhibited
the pursuit also inhibited the three of them. They could
no longer see the signs they had left, or judge the lay of
the land they had noted. What had been reasonably fa-
miliar was now unfamiliar. Also, the creatures of the
night were emerging, including mosquitoes. The biting
blackflies of day could be squeezed off when they
alighted; they tended to come in swarms, and lost inter-
est when motion stopped. But mosquitoes were inex-
orable, and invisible in the dark. The three of them had
put on no fish oil to repel these, because its odor would
give away their location.

They kept moving, regardless. Their progress became
noisier as they made missteps, and they blundered into
brush and muck, surely leaving a trail that would be ob-
vious by daylight. But they knew that the pursuers would
make similar noise, unless they used familiar paths.

“Let’s use the paths!” Hotfoot urged. “We can move
faster and quieter, and that is less risk than this.”

Woodpecker considered a moment, then agreed. They
cut across to the nearest path, paused to listen for pur-
suit, then got on it. They were alone; either the Gale had
given up the pursuit, or they were not in this vicinity.

This helped greatly. They proceeded at almost day-
time velocity, for there was no danger of going astray
here.

They reached the river. Now they had to cut through
the brush again, for their canoe was hidden well away
from the regular path. There were brambles and dense
thickets, and the ground was marshy. They feared for
snakes and alligators. But they were getting close to
their canoe, and once they recovered that, they would
have an easy time getting the rest of the way back.

But they couldn’t find it in the dark. They ranged
back and forth along the slushy bank, searching for the
particular palmetto thicket they had used, but they had
hidden the canoe too well. In the night they were baffled.

Finally they consulted, and decided to wait for dawn,
when they should be able to spot it readily. They took
turns sitting guard, one always alert while two slept.

Now Hootfoot became thoroughly aware of the inci-
dental injuries he had taken: the scratches that were not
of the ritual preparation, the insect bites, the bruises
from stumbling in the darkness. He was also hungry, for
he had not eaten in a day and two nights, and tired, for
he had not rested in that time either. The excitement
that had sustained him on the mission was now ex-
hausted. He was not sleepy, just phenomenally weary.

But the worst thing was the image of the slain war-
rior, the arrow through his neck. That man’s spirit was
surely orienting on Hotfoot now, seeking retribution.

The living men could be avoided, if one was clever
enough, but not the spirits of the dead. The spirits could
only be diverted by the intercession of a priest — but un-
til Hotfoot got home, the priest could not intercede. He
was vulnerable now. The horror of his action rose like a
dark mass before him, seeming to take animate form,
and he was afraid. Afraid because of his coming shame.
Because he was no true warrior, having no joy of kill-
ing. Too late, he had learned that he was a coward.

But the spirit did not attack immediately. At least, not
tangibly. That was not the way of spirits, though. They
did not make physical mischief, they acted more subtly.
They seeped into the body of the offender, entering
through his nostrils, his mouth, his anus, and spreading
out within, taking time to choose their targets. Often it
was the joints, which slowly coalesced, so that they op-
erated only with decreasing range and increasing pain,
making a cripple of a man without leaving a mark on
him. Sometimes it was more subtle yet, so that he sick-
ened and died, and no priest could cure him. Hotfoot
knew that he was not free; he was now an easy target
for the spirit’s wrath.

Dawn came, and he gazed about, for his watch had
been last. Now the locale became increasingly familiar;
they were not far at all from the place they sought. Had
the night not changed things so much, they should read-
ily have found their canoe.

The others stirred. Silently, Hotfoot indicated the di-
rection, and they nodded.

They moved to it, and it was there, exactly as they
had left it. Their hiding place had been secure — almost
too secure. Next time, they would be sure to memorize

Piers Anthony

the position in such a way that they could find it by
night as well as by day!

They launched the canoe and climbed carefully into
it. Alligator took the rear paddle this time, and Hotfoot
the lead, while Woodpecker knelt in the center, as be-
fore. They glided into the center, and beyond, seeking
the familiar channel that lacked the main current. The
Little Big River was gentle, easy to ride, but still it was
pointless to oppose the current unnecessarily.

The river narrowed — and disaster struck. Abruptly a
canoe shot out from the bank ahead, to intercept them.

It carried six Gale warriors. The Gale had been watching
the river — as the three of them should have anticipated.

Immediately Hotfoot and Alligator spun the canoe
about, heading downstream. But the Gale craft followed,
and it had four paddlers. It was overhauling them rapidly.

“Shore!” Woodpecker snapped. Indeed, they were al-
ready turning to get to it.

They cut close to the dense foliage of the bank, heed-
less of whatever landing they might make. On land they
would have a chance to hide, to lose themselves in the
thickets. This was Toco territory; the war party would not
dare remain long, for fear of discovery by Toco warriors.

The canoe crashed into an overhanging branch — and
Hotfoot felt a stunning blow to his left shoulder. His left
arm went numb, and his hand lost its hold on the pad-
dle. It didn’t matter; he had to scramble out of the canoe
as it halted, and splash to the shore behind the other two.

Alligator and Woodpecker were fighting their way to
land as the enemy canoe came close. An arrow whistled
past Hotfoot’s head to graze Woodpecker’s thigh. Wood-
pecker seemed not to notice it as he scrambled through
the brush. Then they were all through, and foliage pro-
tected their rear for the moment. The Gale would not
shoot blindly; arrows were too precious to waste.

Alligator turned to the others — and paused, staring at
Hotfoot’s shoulder. Hotfoot looked, and was amazed.

An arrow was projecting from his shoulder. The head
was deep in the flesh, the shaft and feathers behind. That
was the blow he had felt!

“Hold him!” Woodpecker whispered.

Wordlessly, Alligator grabbed Hotfoot from the front,
clasping him in an embrace that left him anchored. Hot-
foot clenched his teeth and stood still, knowing what was
coming. He could not make a sound, for that would
show unmanly weakness, and could attract the Gale.

There was a wrench, and a terrible flare of pain. Wood-
pecker was yanking the arrow out, as he had to, but it
wasn’t coming readily. It tore at the muscle and sinew,
the agony of it radiating out through Hotfoot’s whole
body. He clenched his teeth, making no sound, though
all his world was agony. Then the arrow snapped.

Woodpecker held the shaft up. It had broken off, leav-
ing the arrowhead embedded. Hotfoot knew that was
bad; it meant the malignant Gale spirit of the arrow re-
mained in him, and it would surely cause him much grief.

As the surge of pain abated, he felt the wetness on
his back, and knew it was his blood flowing down. That,
too, was bad, for it was good blood that leaked from
this region, not bad blood.

Now came a clamor behind. The Gale were landing!

The three ran. Woodpecker leading the way, weaving
through the brush. But Hotfoot could not keep the pace;
his shoulder was throbbing and his feet were tiring.

In a moment Woodpecker realized what the problem
was. The wound was weakening Hotfoot. “Hide,” he
said. “We will lead them away from you.”

“They will follow the blood,” Alligator pointed out.

Woodpecker scooped his hand along Hotfoot’s back,
soaking it in warm blood. “I will lead them with blood!”
Then he was away, his hand extended, the blood drip-
ping from it.

Hotfoot stumbled to the side, hunched over so that
more blood would not drip, and crawled between low
palmetto fronds. As he heard the Gale charging, he
stretched out under the fronds, face down, his left arm
dragging. If the ruse worked, he would be safe; if not . . .

It worked. The Gale warriors paused only to inspect
the blood at the spot where the three had stopped, then
charged on after the drops Woodpecker had planted.

But Hotfoot knew he had to move on, because it
would not take long for the Gale to realize that they
now pursued only two, and that the blood had stopped.
They could come back, rechecking the trail, and then
they would find the offshoot. They would be after Hot-
foot, and he could not outrun them.

Indeed, he could hardly run at all now. He hauled
himself to his feet, and almost collapsed. He staggered
on, away from the direction of the other path. He knew
he would have to stop soon. Where could he go, where
he would not be followed?

Here.

He gazed blearily about, trying to identify what he had
heard. Who had called? Had he really heard anything?

Then he realized he was close to the ancient holy
place, where youths never went. The spirits of the dead
were here, guarding their burial ground. There would
be terrible retribution against almost any living person
who defiled this site. Only a priest could come here.

Yet he had heard a call. Where could it have come
from, except here?

Was he about to die, and the spirits knew this? But
he was a mere stripling, a boy, not worthy to share their
habitat. They should have only contempt for him.

No. He was now a man. He had made his first kill,
and received his first serious wound. If he died of it, he
died a man, even though he had not yet been awarded
a man’s name. The spirits would know that.

He staggered on toward the low mound, knowing
where it was. The scene seemed to be tilting crazily,
and the trees were whirling around him, but somehow
he kept his feet until the sacred hill was there.

It was not high, only up to his belly, but it spread out
widely. It was just a small rise, overgrown with brush
and small trees, undisturbed. But everyone knew what it
was. No one ever confused a burial site.

Hotfoot felt his consciousness fading. “O spirits of the
mound,” he gasped. “I come as a supplicant. Accept — ”

Then he fell, his invocation unfinished.

Tatham Mound

Book

Reviews

Xenocide

by Orson Scott Card
Tor Books, July 1991
448 pages, $21.95 (hardcover)

Xenocide is easily the most ambi-
tious, important, gripping, and frus-
trating science fiction novel I’ve read
so far this year. It’s the sequel to En-
der's Game and Speaker for the Dead,
Card’s multiple a-ward-winners. It’s
not quite as satisfying as the nearly
perfect boy-saves-humanity tale of
Ender’s Game, but it’s much better
than the fundamentally flawed
Speaker for the Dead.

This story picks up with Ender
Wiggins — living under the name An-
drew Wiggins because Ender is uni-
versally despised for committing
xenocide and wiping out the alien
buggers — 3,000 years in the future
from events in Ender’s Game. He’s
middle-aged, married, and living on
a quiet, out-of-the-way planet named
Lusitania. Things would seem idyllic,
but they’re not.

His stepchildren are brilliant — and
at odds with each other and every-
one else. Ender’s wife has left him
and entered a convent. The planet
harbors a possibly intelligent vims,
which has the potential to wipe out
humanity if it ever gets loose. The
bugger hive queen Ender saved ear-
lier in the series is rebuilding her
race on this world. And Congress
has just dispatched a fleet of ships to
blow Lusitania to dust.

Card manages a difficult juggling
act, keeping all these events in line

(and interweaving a subplot involv-
ing Congress’s genetic manipulation
of the Chinese-descended people of
another planet. Path). The threats
are all real. The characters are all
real. Card makes you care about
what happens to them all. As he
takes the reader into each charac-
ter’s head, we see all viewpoints at
once . . . and learn how all are
equally valid in different contexts.

If the vims is sentient (and it may
be!), destroying it to save humanity
would be xenocide. Destroying the
vims would also destroy the friendly
piggies, the planet’s native intelligent
life, who have developed a symbiot-
ic relationship with the vims. If En-
der and his stepchildren must decide
whether humanity or the vims/pig-
gies will live . . . which race will it
be? Can you make a decision to
wipe out an entire sentient species?

Despite all these events, there is a
rather startling lack of real action.
The plot progresses for the most
part through discussion. Characters
learn things, then disseminate the in-
formation, draw new conclusions,
and keep going. All of the galaxy-
shaking dramatic events remain (for
the most part) in the background,
leaving characters free to dominate
the stage. If this was a deliberate
plotting move on Card’s part, it’s an
interesting one. It puts the book on
a more intellectual level, and forces
the reader to think about what’s go-
ing on, rather than vicariously expe-
rience a roller-coaster ride of actions
and reactions.

Does the book work? In most
ways, yes. My biggest qualms lie
with its lack of clear resolutions to
all problems posed. At the end,
there are just as many plot threads
left loose as are tied up. We already
know another book is coming to fin-
ish off the series; hopefully it won’t
take too long.

Do pick up a copy of Xenocide
now, though. Tor Books is pushing
the book hard, trying to give Orson
Scott Card the breakout sales of Asi-
mov, Clarke, and McCaffrey; their ef-
forts, combined with the magnitude
of the series’s success so far, guaran-
tee Xenocide will be this fall’s big-
gest SF book. Despite its lack of a
concrete resolution, you can bet the
book will be on almost every award
ballot next year. — JGB

The Magic Wagon

by Joe R. Lansdale
Borderlands Press, April 1991
146 pages, $50.00 (hardcover)

Borderlands Press is a small, special-
ty publishing company mn by hor-
ror writer Tom Monteleone (who
also designs and typesets the
books). Monteleone seems most in-
terested in publishing signed-and-
slipcased limited edition books by
cult classic authors. Besides Lans-
dale’s book, Monteleone is repub-
lishing all of Harlan Ellison’s works
in uniform hardcover editions.

The Magic Wagon is one of those
special books which really defy cat-
egorization. It’s a beautifully written

Betancourt, Bunnell, Von Rospach

lilSi

mm.

ORION

—IN THE

Dyin^

TIM*

“

.vu.iii#»(fiaiKipo©inii- TriTry
><> AnSMM D<HiyAr«ivt ;

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fantasy set in the west just after the
Civil War. We start with Buster Fogg,
a nice enough boy whose life is
turned upside down by a tornado. It
kills his parents, sweeps away his
house, wrecks his family’s farm.
When the bank forecloses, Buster
sets off on his own to seek his fame
and fortune.

He gets picked up by two travel-
ing showmen, Billy Bob and Albert,
who travel the country by wagon.
They do trick shooting, have a
wrestling ape, and sell a miracle
Cure-All. Billy Bob also claims to be
the illegitimate son of Wild Bill
Hickok. Albert is an ex-slave.

When the three of them acquire
(in a rather unscmpulous deal) the
mummified body of the real Hickok,
which has been preserved in a mag-
ical box by an old Indian medicine
man, things get weird. It’s as if the
spirit of Hickok’s gun has taken pos-
session of Billy Bob, turning him
into a daring, bullying braggart gun-
man. It’s up to Albert and Buster to
save him, if they can.

It’s not so much the plot (which
is wild and wonderful) as the prose
that I find appealing. Lansdale is a
master of the odd, poetic phrase,
and his characters talk like people
ought to talk. I find myself rereading
paragraphs just for the joy of his
writing, as when Buster (his foot
broken from the tornado) meets up

with the wagon;

% « «

At first, I thought what was in

the cage was a deformed colored

fella, but when I got closer, I
seen it was some kind of animal
covered in black fur. It was about
the scariest ugliest damned thing
I’d ever seen.

Right then I was feeling a mite
less proud than I had been earlier
that morning, so I got them
crutches under my sore arms and
hobbled out into the road waving
a hand at the wagon. I was aim-
ing on getting a ride or getting
run slap over so I could end the
torture. I didn’t feel like I could
crutch another mile.

The wagon slowed and pulled
alongside me. The driver yelled,
“Whoa, you old ugly mules,” and
the harness bells ceased to shake.

I could see the animal in the
cage good now, but I still couldn’t
figure on what it was. There was
some yellow words painted
above the cage that said, “THE
MAGIC WAGON,” and to the right
of the cage was a little sign with
some fancy writing on it that
read: “Magic Tricks, Trick Shoot-
ing, Fortune Telling, Wrestling
Ape, Side Amusements, Medicine
For What Ails You, And All At
Reasonable Prices.”

Sounded pretty good to me.

* « #

It sounds pretty good to me, too. If
you’re not already a Lansdale fan,
you might want to start with his
more readily locatable thrillers. Cold
in July and Savage Season, which
are Bantam paperbacks. I bet you’ll
be searching for more soon enough.

You can order The Magic Wagon
from: Borderlands Press, P.O. Box
32333, Baltimore, MD 21208. En-
close a couple of dollars for postage
and handling. — JGB

Xenocide

by Orson Scott Card
Tor Books, July 1991
448 pages, $21.95 (hardcover)

As an exercise in theme, Xenocide is
as far-ranging a character study as
you’ll find in modern SF. But there’s
a catch — ^to keep its thematic struc-
ture intact, the novel makes leaps of
logic that strain its science-fictional
credibility.

On a broad level, Orson Scott
Card is writing about loyalty. There’s
Han Qing-jao’s loyalty to the unseen
gods haunting her existence, tenu-
ously balanced with loyalty to her
father. Han Fei-tzu’s loyalty is divid-
ed between oaths he has made to
Starways Congress and the moral
imperative of saving the distant
world of Lusitania from obliteration
by Congressional forces. Meanwhile,
on Lusitania, Ender Wiggin’s family
and friends find their own loyalties
torn, as the human colony struggles
to contain or destroy the deadly de-
scolada virus — ^whose possible sen-
tience further complicates the ethical
dilemma.

There’s not an uninteresting char-
acter in Card’s cast. Ender Wiggin
remains at the heart of the Lusitani-
an conflicts, whose participants are
portrayed with passionate clarity. On

Book Reviews

faraway Path, the tension between
Qing-jao and Fei-tzu, balanced by
the common sense of servant girl Si
Wang-mu, is equally compelling.

And the intangible Jane comes into
her own in Xenocide, learning the
secrets of her existence just as
events conspire to threaten it.

Some of the resolutions, though,
are intriguing rather than satisfying.
Card carefully develops the concept
of “philotic twining” — that all life is
subatomically interconnected by in-
tangible tendrils of sheer will. Yet
once the descolada’s possible sen-
tience is suggested, no one thinks to
apply this premise to the virus, ex-
amining its philotic connections to
see what data they might yield. It’s
not unreasonable, in the deadline-
charged environment Card creates,
that the descolada’s intelligence is
never firmly resolved. But it is curi-
ous that his characters, for all their
brilliance, miss this significant poten-
tial avenue of analysis.

A second unsettling element con-
cerns the colonists’ startling ap-
proach to faster-than-light travel.

The mechanism is unconventional,
though it flows logically from the
underpinnings of Card’s universe.

But it’s entirely too convenient in
two senses: given the system’s single
essential component, its discovery
comes much later than might have
been expected; and as implemented,
the system is far more precise than
is necessary. (It also has a strange
and spectacular side effect that
opens — and arguably ignores — a
whole new can of philotes. Suffice
to say that neither life nor death are
apparently what they used to be.)

Both these reservations amount to
second-guessing the novel’s internal
logic — ^which is dangerous in a book
where the protagonists are pointedly
given humanity’s weaknesses along
with its strengths, and where, as
with life, loose ends aren’t tied off
neatly when the story stops. It’s also
easy to greet Xenocide with unrea-
sonable expectations: either that its
brilliance will surpass its award-win-
ning predecessors, or that it will in-
evitably falter by comparison.

The more reasoned judgment is
that neither extreme is accurate.

Xenocide is eloquent and thought-
fully conceived, and its imperfec-
tions should be grounds for discus-
sion rather than disapproval. — JCB

Deepwater Dreams

by Sydney J. Van Scyoc
Avon Books, June 1991
256 pages, $3.95 (paperback)

One of SF’s most popular plots is
the coming-of-age story in which the
protagonist must choose between
her familiar but stagnant culture and
the promise of a new, more enlight-
ened way of life. But while the out-
line and characters of Deepwater
Dreams fit squarely into that com-
fortable mold, author Sydney Van
Scyoc rings an interesting change on
the choice itself.

The setup comes straight from the
cookie cutter. Nuela is a young
woman with adult responsibilities,
but little status. Her parents are long
gone, leaving a younger sister to be
raised, and the demands of child-
rearing have left Nuela with little
time for her own pleasure. But
when a tidal wave wreaks havoc on
her island home, circumstances
force her unexpectedly into a
strange sea-dwelling society whose
very existence is kept largely secret
from the land-based population.

It’s here that matters become
more intriguing. Though the oceanic
folk consider themselves generally
above the land-dwellers, choice and
tradition divide them into a dozen
different, often combative sub-
groups. Initially drafted as a messen-
ger to one of these colonies, Nuela
is promptly captured by a rival
group and becomes a key player in
a conflict where she barely knows
the rules. Refreshingly, the issues
presented aren’t immediately clear-
cut, and the decisions Nuela must
make emerge from diplomacy and
compromise rather than black-and-
white idealism.

Van Scyoc’s worldbuilding is both
conservative and implausible, or at
least vague. A prologue makes it
clear that several species of sea life
have been genetically tailored to as-
sume specific roles in the water-
world’s ecology. The human popula-

tion has also been engineered, but
rather oddly. While not water-
breathers or even cetaceans, they
display extraordinary swimming
ability and endurance, and can ac-
cess a body of dream-knowledge
that is seen as the word of the gods.
This “god-lore” is badly underex-
plained, and strikes an anachronistic
note in an otherwise straightforward
science-fictional atmosphere.

Deepwater Dreams is clearly over
on the “adventure” end of the SF
spectrum, designed as a pleasant di-
version rather than a high-powered
technical or literary speculation. Van
Scyoc, though, gives the book more
dimension than the average adven-
ture yarn — and even if some of the
dimensions are uncharted, the over-
all execution is good enough to
push the novel to a place near the
front of its class. — JCB

Shadow Leader

by Tara K. Harper
Del Rey Books, May 1991
324 pages, $5.95 (paperback)

Anne McCaffrey’s protagonists link
minds with dragons; Mercedes Lack-
ey’s do the same with sentient hors-
es. Comparative newcomer Tara
Harper adopts the same premise,
but makes more thorough science-
fictional use of the notion in this se-
quel to last year’s Wolfwalker.

Where McCaffrey and Lackey take
the idea of the telepathic bond for
granted. Harper explores the costs
of such a link along with its benefits.

For travelers desperately avoiding
capture by agents of a relentless
spymaster, Dion’s wolfwalker status
can be highly useful. Within limits,
she can see what her wolf sees and
use their combined senses to greatly
enhance the group’s scouting ability.
Moreover, the genetically enhanced
wolves of Dion’s world are the key
to a long-lost psychic healing pow-
er, and only Dion’s access to the
technique has kept the entire party
alive and functional to date.

The catch is that tapping the
link’s full power sends Gray Hishn’s
lupine instincts flowing into Dion’s
mind, and only enormous willpower
can prevent her from surrendering

Betancourt, Bunnell, Von Rospach

to the wolf-consciousness. The heal-
ing technique is especially danger-
ous to use lightly, or when the user
herself is weakened.

Needless to say, that means Harp-
er constantly drops Dion and her
friends into situations where she
must resort to her healing powers or
override Gray Hishn’s instincts for
self-preservation. The band treks
cautiously from a sparsely traveled
mountain wilderness through farm-
land and village toward the enemy
capital, where they confront both
political intrigue and arena-style com-
bat before regaining their freedom.

Apart from the thoughtful execu-
tion of the wolf-linkage. Harper’s
storytelling strengths are in pacing
and scene-setting. The world she
builds has a knowledgeable frontier-
style mggedness, and her characters
move through it with aggressive de-
termination. Whether the adversaries
are carnivorous plants or human op-
ponents, the frequent action se-
quences are crisp and compelling.

The briskness is almost enough to
overcome the book’s two real liabili-
ties. Shadow Leader’s plot doesn’t
stand well on its own; it’s really the
second half of the story begun in
Wolfwalker. Del Key’s packaging
clearly establishes that the books are
connected (and the Edwin Herder
cover paintings are a welcome con-
trast to Del Key’s usually crowded
jacket art), but stops short of making
the link clear.

More seriously. Harper’s lively
style turns noticeably thicker when-
ever it gets near a psychological or
romantic subplot. That’s particularly
true of the dialogue, where charac-
ters’ names pop up as if to identify
Important Lines (’’You deny your
own grief, Aranur”), and the tone
takes on an earnestness somewhere
between cloying and cute. Harper’s
players are interesting enough on
their own; she doesn’t need to work
this hard to make their relationships
convincing.

But the occasional heaviness is
largely counterbalanced by the
book’s spirited pace, and the twist
of wildness in the bond between
Dion and Hishn lends freshness to a
familiar SF concept. Shadow Leader

is both traditional and distinctive in
its approach to its material, and
that’s rare enough to make it well
worth a look. — JCB

Nothing Sacred

by Elizabeth Ann Scarborough
Doubleday Foundation, March 1991
342 pages, $10.95 (trade paperback)

Elizabeth Ann Scarborough has fol-
lowed her Nebula Award-winning
The Healer’s War with another book
about what happens to people when
countries go to war. In Nothing
Sacred, the place is Tibet sometime
in the future, and the People’s Ke-
public of China, India and the USSK
are all fighting each other over con-
trol of Tibet and the Himalayas. The
United States, as part of the NACAF
(North American Continental Allied
Forces) alliance, has decided to not
play favorites and is sending arms
and soldiers to fight and die for all
three sides.

If that doesn’t make sense, con-
sider that in the U.S. there is chronic
overpopulation and unemployment
problems, so sending the least em-
ployable people off to war (and
making sure a chunk of them don’t
come back) is a relatively palatable
way to keep the home front under
control.

That’s what happens to Viveka
Jeng Vanachek. Unemployable be-
cause she only has a couple of
bachelor’s degrees, she enlists in the
Army and is turned into a cartogra-
pher — ^with the amount of armament
raining down on Tibet, maps rapidly
go out of date and need to be con-
stantly updated. On her first air
mapping mission, she’s shot down,
captured by the Tibetans and sent to
one of their highest-security prison
camps.

The camp, very high up in the
bowl of a mountain peak, uses the
prisoners as laborers to dig out and
catalog a set of ruins. It isn’t until
she’s been there a while that she re-
alizes that there are any number of
strange things going on — her cell-
mates can’t remember how long
they’ve been here, and they talk
about aspects of their past as though
they were recent things — even

though, to Viveka, the events had
occurred long before she was born.

One look at the cover, which is
both inaccurate to the story and a
spoiler as far as what the story is
about, is going to clue the reader in
to a major piece of the puzzle — the
ruins that are being dug out are the
remains of the village known as
Shangri-La, the legendary place of
Tibetan magic. It was destroyed ear-
ly in the war by an errant bomb,
and the Tibetans are trying to bring
it back to life before it’s too late.

Too late for what? The discovery
of the reasons for the existence of
the camp and what it is there for is a
major part of the enjoyment of the
book. Unfortunately, the back cover
gives part of it away — the magic of
Shangri-La continues, and in the up-
coming nuclear holocaust, only the
output of Shangri-La will give hu-
manity a chance to survive the
bombs and the fallout — if they can
get it ready in time to support them
when the rest of the world burns.

Scarborough has written a fasci-
nating story here — a new look at the
old Tibetan ways that is also a
scathing indictment of modern civi-
lization, especially western civiliza-
tion. Even with all the hints and the
spoilers provided, you’re not going
to find your enjoyment of this book
reduced. A complex story, very in-
teresting characters in a truly unique
and picturesque setting makes this
one of the top books of the year.
This one may well find itself onto
the short list for the awards. — CVR

Sacred Visions

edited by Andrew M. Greeley and
Michael Cassutt
Tor Books, July 1991
320 pages, $12.95 (trade paperback),

$22.95 (hardcover)

In this reprint theme anthology,
Greeley and Cassutt have put to-
gether a collection of SF stories with
a Catholic theme. Unlike a lot of
“Christian” fiction being published
today, the stories contained are not
fictionalized proselytizing or blind
justifications of the Christian ethic.

Instead, they have collected
twelve stories that closely examine

Book Reviews

the meaning of religion and faith.
This anthology is an attempt to bring
together stories that, instead of be-
ing religious, attempt to look at why
religion exists and why it is such an
important part of being human.

Some of the stories are well-known
and considered classics in the field
— James Blish is represented by “A
Case of Conscience,” and Walter M.
Miller, Jr.’s “A Canticle for Leibowitz”
is reprinted.

Jeff Duntemann’s story, “Our Lady
of the Endless Sky,” looks at the
place where it stops being “good
luck” and starts being “a miracle” —
God works in mysterious ways, and
sometimes the religious people are
the last to realize it. James Patrick
Kelly is represented with “Saint
Theresa of the Aliens,” a story in
which religion is used and abused
for the best of intentions.

By far the best story in the book
is Nancy Kress’s “Jrinity,” in which
technology has progressed to the
point where the question “Does God
exist?” can finally be definitively an-
swered — but does humanity really
want to know? A close second is
Robert Silverberg’s “The Pope of the
Chimps,” in which a family of chim-
panzees used for research are intro-
duced to the concept that humans —
in effect their gods, since the entire
reality they live in is controlled by
them — can die. If your God is mor-
tal, what does that say about you? If
a primate’s ultimate goal in life is to
die and become human, what hap-
pens when you find out that’s not
the final step?

Other stories include Jack McDe-
vitt’s “Gus,” which tries to look at
whether an Artificial Intelligence
personality can have a soul (but
does so with an unsatisfying end-
ing — either you have a soul, and the
priest can not assist or allow suicide,
or you don’t have a soul and the
priest can’t give final rites and a full
burial. McDevitt tried to have it both
ways and it bothered me); Cassutt’s
“Curious Elations,” Gene Wolfe’s
“The Seraph from Its Sepulcher,” An-
thony Boucher’s “The Quest for
Saint Aquin,” R.A. Lafferty’s “And
Walk Now Gently Through the Eire,”
and Greeley’s own “Xorinda the

Witch,” the only story in the book I
felt wasn’t good enough to deserve
publication — it has a weak plot and
cardboard characters, is excessively
preachy, and has a horrid deus ex
machina ending that makes the en-
tire story irrelevant.

One bad story out of twelve’s
pretty good, and this weakness is
well overcome by the strength of the
Silverberg and Kress stories. This is
a strong anthology on an interesting
theme, even for (or perhaps espe-
cially for) non-Catholics. — CVR

Orion in the Dying Time

by Ben Bova
Tor Books, August 1991
4l6 pages, $18.95 (hardcover)

The latest book in the Orion series
from Ben Bova takes us far back into
early prehistory to look at the death
of the dinosaurs and the very early
days of humanity’s predecessors.

Orion — the hunter of ancient leg-
end — is a construct of the Creators,
who, for lack of a better term for
them, are our gods. These are the
beings that were worshipped in vari-
ous cultures — Roman, Greek, Sume-
rian, and others. They aren’t gods,
though (recalling Clarke’s law on
magic) it’s somewhat hard to tell the
difference. Instead, they are humans
from the remote future that have
evolved into beings as far advanced
from us as we are from the first
mammals. They are guardians of the
time stream, traveling back and forth
through the ages making sure that
the fibers of reality stay neatly
weaved and smooth.

That’s difficult, though — there are
various factors that cause problems
in the past that might well change
the future these beings have come
from, perhaps change it enough that
they may never exist. (Or never did
exist? Bova is playing fast and loose
with concepts like free will, predes-
tination and causality. If it is possi-
ble to have never existed in the far
future, then that’s the threat they
face — the English language just
doesn’t handle time-travel concepts
well.)

In this case, the threat is a crea-
ture called Set. Ele is as advanced

and powerful as the gods, but comes
from a planet where the reptiles
didn’t die and now reign supreme.
He will, in fact, be worshipped as
Set in the Egyptian culture, unless
he succeeds in his plan to destroy
all life on Earth and prepare it to
take the population of his world,
which needs to emigrate before their
sun goes nova. That he didn’t suc-
ceed doesn’t mean he won’t succeed,
since simply because we haven’t
been wiped off the earth doesn’t
mean he isn’t going to be able to
wipe us off the earth back in the
pre-Cambrian (isn’t time travel fun?).

The Orion stories are a lot of fun,
but you can’t take them too serious-
ly. Bova has built a cosmology that
— ^while not impossible — is pretty
unlikely based on what we know
about the development of our solar
system. On top of that, his view of
the extermination of the dinosaurs
and the transformation of the solar
system to our current form probably
wouldn’t stand up to rigorous scien-
tific examination, but that really isn’t
the point of the book — the science
was put together to support the sto-
ry, not the other way around.

What bothers me about this book
are the Creators. When these so-
called guardians run up against a
power that is their peer, someone
who can literally make them all go
poof and make them have-never-ex-
isted, they don’t fight him directly,
but instead send Orion. Orion is a
powerful being (even the Creators
don’t realize how powerful), but he
is mortal and nowhere near the
power of Set. You don’t send Boy
Scouts up against an army, especial-
ly when survival is at stake, yet
that’s what Bova has done here.

Orion in the Dying Time is a com-
petent book, but if I had it to do
over again. I’d probably wait until it
comes out in paperback to read it.
It’s not bad, but it’s also not much
more than an evening’s enjoyment
that’ll be soon forgotten. — CVR

Betancourt, Bunnell, Von Rospach

The Face
of the Waters

From the author's forthcoming novel

of the same name

Robert Silverberg

On this tropical night Lawler
was barefoot and wore only a
twist of yellow cloth made
from water-lettuce fronds
around his waist. The air was
warm and heavy and the sea
was calm. The island, that
webwork of living and semi-
living and formerly living tis-
sue drifting on the breast of
the vast world-spanning
ocean, swayed almost imper-
ceptibly beneath his feet. Like
all the inhabited islands of Hy-
dros, Sorve was rootless, a
free-floating wanderer, mov-
ing wherever the currents and
winds and the occasional tidal
surge cared to carry it. Lawler
was able to feel the tightly
woven withes of the flooring
giving and spreading as he
walked, and he heard the sea
lapping at them just a couple
of meters below. But he
moved easily, lightly, his long

Illustration by Nick Smith

lean body attuning itself automatically to the rhythms of
the island’s movements. They were the most natural
thing in the world to him.

The softness of the night was deceptive. Most times
of the year Sorve was something other than a soft place
to live. Its climate alternated between periods of hot-
and-dry and cold-and-wet, with only the sweet little
summer interlude when Sorve was drifting in mild, hu-
mid equatorial latitudes to provide a brief illusion of
comfort and ease. This was the good time of year, now.
Food was abundant and the air was sweet. The islanders
rejoiced in it. The rest of the year life was much more of
a struggle.

Unhurriedly Lawler made his way around the reser-
voir and down the ramp to the lower terrace. It was a
gentle slope from here to the island’s rim. He went past
the scattered buildings of the shipyard from which Nid
Delagard ran his maritime empire and the indistinct
domed shapes that were the waterfront factories, in
which metals — nickel, iron, cobalt, vanadium, tin — ^were
extracted from the tissues of low-phylum sea creatures
by slow, inefficient processes. It was hard to make out
anything clearly, but after some forty years of living on
this one small island Lawler had no trouble getting
around any part of the place in the dark.

There was no hint of morning yet. The sky was a
deep black. Some nights Sunrise, the sister planet of Hy-
dros, gleamed in the heavens like a great blue-green
eye, but tonight Sunrise was absent on the other side of
the world, casting its bright glow on the mysterious wa-
ters of the unexplored far hemisphere. One of the three
moons was visible, though, a tiny point of hard white
light off to the east, close to the horizon. And stars shim-
mered everywhere, cascades of glittering silver powder
scattered across the blackness, a ubiquitous dusting of
brightnesses. That infinite horde of distant suns formed
a dazzling backdrop for the one mighty foreground con-
stellation, the brilliant Hydros Cross — two blazing rows
of stars that arched across the sky at right angles to each
other like a double cincture, one spanning the world
from pole to pole, the other marching steadfastly along
above the equator.

For Lawler these were the stars of home, the only
stars he had ever seen. He was Hydros-born, fifth gener-
ation. He had never traveled to any other world and
never would. Sorve Island was as familiar to him as his
own skin. And yet he sometimes tumbled without warn-
ing into frightening moments of confusion when all
sense of familiarity dissolved and he felt like a stranger
here: times when it seemed to him that he had just ar-
rived on Hydros that very day, flung down out of space
like a falling star, a castaway from his truly native place
far away. Sometimes he saw the lost mother world of
Earth shining in his mind, bright as any star, its great
blue seas divided by the enormous golden-green land
masses that were called continents, and he thought. This
is my home, this is my true home. Lawler wondered if
any other humans on Hydros ever experienced some-
thing like that now and again. Probably so, though no
one ever spoke of it. They were all strangers here, after

all. This world belonged to the Gillies. He and everyone
like him here lived here as uninvited guests.

He had reached the brink of the sea now. The famil-
iar railing, rough, woody-textured like everything else
on this artificial island that had neither soil nor vegeta-
tion, came up to meet his grasp as he clambered to the
top of the seawall.

Here at the wall the slope in the island’s topography,
which ran gradually downhill from the built-up high
ground in the interior and the ocean bulwark beyond it,
reversed itself sharply and the flooring turned upward to
form a meniscus, a crescent rim, that shielded the inner
streets against all but the most severe of tidal surges.
Grasping the rail, leaning forward over the dark lapping
water, Lawler stood staring outward for a moment, as
though offering himself to the all-surrounding ocean.

Even in the darkness he had a complete sense of the
comma-shaped island’s form and his exact place along
its shore. The island was eight kilometers long from tip
to tip, and about a kilometer across at its widest point,
measuring from the bayfront to the summit of the rear
bulwark that held back the open sea. He was near the
center, the innermost gulf. To his right and left the is-
land’s two curving arms stretched outward before him,
the rounded one where the Gillies lived, and the narrow
tapering one where the island’s little handful of human
settlers clustered close together.

Right in front of him, enclosed by that pair of un-
equal arms, was the bay that was the living heart of the
island. The Gillie builders of the island had created an
artificial bottom there, an underwater shelf of interlaced
wood-kelp timbers attached to the mainland from arm
to arm, so that the island always would have a shallow,
fertile lagoon adjacent to it, a captive pond. The wild
menacing predators that haunted the open sea never en-
tered the bay: perhaps the Gillies had made some treaty
with them long ago. A lacing of the spongy bottom-
dwelling night-algae, needing no light, bound the un-
derside of the bay floor together, ever protecting and re-
newing it with their steady stubborn growth. Above that
was sand, washed in by storms from the great unknown
ocean floor farther out. And above that a thicket of use-
ful aquatic plants of a hundred different species or
more, in which all manner of sea creatures swarmed.
Shellfish of many sorts inhabited its lower reaches, filter-
ing sea water through their soft tissues and concentrat-
ing valuable minerals within themselves for the use of
the islanders. Sea worms and serpents moved among
them. Plump and tender fish grazed there. Just now
Lawler could see a pod of huge phosphorescent crea-
tures moving out there, emanating pulsating waves of
blue-violet light: the great beasts known as mouths, per-
haps, or perhaps they were platforms, but it was still too
dark to tell. And beyond the bright green water of the
bay was the great ocean sea, rolling to the horizon and
past it, holding the entire world in its grasp, a gloved
hand gripping a ball. Lawler, staring toward it, felt for
the millionth time the weight of its immensity, its thrust
and power.

A grating bass voice behind him said, “Lawler?”

Robert Silverberg

Caught by surprise, Lawler whirled abruptly, his heart
thundering. He squinted into the graying darkness. He
could just barely make out the figure of a short, stocky
man with a heavy shock of long, greasy-looking hair
standing in the shadows ten or twelve meters to the in-
land side of him.

“Delagard? That you?”

The stocky man stepped forward. Delagard, yes. The
self-appointed top dog of the island, the chief mover
and shaker. What the hell was he doing skulking around
here at this hour?

Delagard always seemed to be up to something tricky,
even when he wasn’t. He was short but not small, a
powerful figure built low to the ground, thick-necked,
heavy-shouldered, paunchy. He wore an ankle-length
sarong that left his broad shaggy chest bare. Even in the
darkness the garment glowed in luminous ripples of
scarlet and turquoise and hot pink. Delagard was the
richest man in the settlement, whatever that meant on a
world where money itself had no meaning, where there
was hardly anything you could spend it on. He was Hy-
dros-born, like Lawler, but he owned businesses on sev-
eral islands and moved around a lot. Delagard was a
few years older than Lawler, perhaps forty-eight or fifty.

“You’re out pretty early this morning, doc,” Delagard
said.

“I generally am. You know that.” Lawler’s voice was
tighter than usual. “It’s a good time of day.”

“If you like to be alone, yes.” Delagard came along-
side Lawler and clapped his hand down on the seawall
railing in a confident, hearty way, as if this island were
his kingdom and the railing his scepter. “You haven’t
asked me yet why I’m up this early.”

“No. I haven’t.”

“Looking for you, is why.”

“Very early to be paying a call on me, if it’s a profes-
sional thing,” Lawler said. “Or a social call, for that mat-
ter. Not that you would.” He pointed to the horizon.

The moon was still gleaming there. No sign of the first
light of the morning was visible yet. The Cross, even
more brilliant than usual with Sunrise not in the sky,
seemed to throb and pulse against the intense black-
ness. “I generally don’t start my office hours before day-
break. You know that, Nid.”

“A special problem,” said Delagard. “Couldn’t wait.
Best taken care of while it’s still dark.”

“Medical problem, is it?”

“Medical problem, yes.”

“Yours?”

“Yes. But I’m not the patient.”

“I don’t understand you.”

“You will. Just come with me.”

“Where?” Lawler said.

“Shipyard.”

What the hell. Delagard seemed very strange this morn-
ing. It was probably something important. “All right,”
said Lawler. “Let’s get going, then.”

Without another word Delagard turned and started
along the path that ran just inside the seawall, heading

toward the shipyard. Lawler followed him in silence.

The path here followed another little promontory paral-
lel to the one where the power plant that the Gillies had
just finished building stood, and as they moved out on it
they had a clear view of the plant. Gillies were going in
and out, carrying armloads of equipment.

“Those slippery fuckers,” Delagard muttered. “I hope
their plant blows up in their faces when they start it up.
If they ever get it started up at all.”

They rounded the far side of the promontory and en-
tered the little inlet where Delagard’s shipyard stood. It
was the biggest human enterprise on Sorve by far, em-
ploying more than a dozen people. Delagard’s ships
constantly went back and forth between the various is-
lands where he did business, carrying trade goods from
place to place, the modest merchandise turned out by
the various cottage industries that humans operated:
fishhooks and chisels and mallets, bottles and jars, arti-
cles of clothing, paper and ink, hand-copied books,
packaged foods, and such. The Delagard fleet also was
the chief distributor of metals and plastics and chemicals
and other such essential commodities which the various
islands so painstakingly produced. Every few years Del-
agard added another island to his chain of commerce.
From the very beginning of human occupation of Hy-
dros, Delagards had been running entrepreneurial busi-
nesses here, but Nid Delagard had expanded the family
operation far beyond its earlier levels.

“This way,” Delagard said.

A strand of pearly dawnlight broke suddenly across
the eastern sky. The stars dimmed and the little moon
on the horizon began to fade from sight as the day start-
ed to come on. The bay was taking on its emerald morn-
ing color. Lawler, following Delagard down the path
into the shipyard, glanced out into it and had his first
clear view of the giant phosphorescent creatures that
had been cruising around there all night. He saw now
that they were mouths: immense flattened baglike crea-
tures, close to a hundred meters in length, that traveled
through the sea with their colossal jaws agape, swallow-
ing everything that lay before them. Once a month or
so, a pod of ten or twelve of them turned up in Sorve
harbor and disgorged the contents of their stomachs,
still alive, into huge wickerwork nets kept there for that
purpose by the Gillies, who harvested them at leisure
over the weeks that followed. It was a good deal for the
Gillies, Lawler thought — ^tons and tons of free food. But
it was hard to see what was in the deal for the mouths.

Delagard said, chuckling, “There’s my competition. If
I could only kill off the fucking mouths, I could be haul-
ing in all sorts of stuff myself to sell to the Gillies.”

“And what would they pay you for it with?”

“The same things they use to pay me now for the
things I sell them,” said Delagard scornfully. “Useful ele-
ments. Cadmium, cobalt, copper, tin, arsenic, iodine, all
the stuff this goddamn ocean is made of. But in very
much bigger quantities than the dribs and drabs they
dole out now, or that we’re capable of extracting our-
selves. We get the mouths out of the picture somehow,
and then I supply the Gillies with their meat, and they

The Face of the Waters

load me up with all kinds of valuable commodities in
return. A very nice deal, let me tell you. Within five
years I’d make them dependent on me for their entire
food supply. There’d be a fortune in it.”

“I thought you were worth a fortune already. How
much more do you need?”

“You just don’t understand, do you?”

“I guess not,” Lawler said. “I’m only a doctor, not a
businessman. Where’s this patient of yours?”

“Easy, easy. Fm taking you as fast as I can, doc.” Del-
agard gestured seaward with a quick brushing move-
ment of his hand. “You see down there, by Jolly’s Pier?
Where that little fishing boat is? That’s where we’re
going.”

Jolly’s Pier was a finger of rotting kelp-timber sticking
out thirty meters or so beyond the seawall, at the far
end of the shipyard. Though it was faded and warped,
battered by tides and nibbled by drillworms and raspers,
the pier was still more or less intact, a venerable artifact
of a vanished era. A crazy old sailor had constructed it,
long dead now, a grizzled weird relic of a man whose
claim it had been to have journeyed solo completely
around the world — even into the Empty Sea, where no
one in his right mind would go, even to the borders of
the Face of the Waters itself, that immense forbidden is-
land far away, the great planetary mystery that apparent-
ly not even the Gillies dared to approach. Lawler could
remember sitting out here at the end of Jolly’s Pier when
he was a boy, listening to the old man spinning his wild,
flamboyant tales of implausible, miraculous adventure.
That was before Delagard had built his shipyard here.
But for some reason Delagard had preserved the be-
draggled pier. He must have liked to listen to the old
man’s yarns too, once upon a time.

One of Delagard’s fishing coracles was tied up along-
side it, bobbing on the bay swells. On the pier near the
place where the coracle was moored was a shed that
looked old enough to have been Jolly’s house, though it
wasn’t. Delagard, pausing outside it, looked up fiercely
into Lawler’s eyes and said in a soft husky growl, “You
understand, doc, whatever you see inside here is abso-
lutely confidential.”

“Spare me the melodrama, Nid.”

“I mean it. You’ve got to promise you won’t talk. It
won’t just be my ass if this gets out. It could screw us
all.”

“If you don’t trust me, get some other doctor. But you
might have some trouble finding one around here.”

Delagard gave him a surly look. Then he produced a
chilly smile. “All right. Whatever you say. Just come on
in.”

He pushed open the door of the shed. It was utterly
dark inside, and unusually humid. Lawler smelled the
tart salty aroma of the sea, strong and concentrated as
though Delagard had been bottling it in here, and some-
thing else, sour and pungent and disagreeable, that he
didn’t recognize at all. He heard faint gmnting noises,
slow and rasping, like the sighs of the damned. Dela-
gard fumbled with something just within the door that
made a rough, bristly sound. After a moment he struck a

match, and Lawler saw that the other man was holding
a bundle of dried seaweed that had been tied at one
end to form a torch, which he had ignited. A dim, smoky
light spread like an orange stain through the shed.

“There they are,” Delagard said.

The middle of the shed was taken up by a caide rec-
tangular storage tank of pitch-caulked wickerwork, per-
haps three meters long and two wide, filled almost to
the brim with seawater. Lawler went over to it and
looked in. Three of the sleek aquatic mammals known
as divers were lying in it, side by side, jammed close to-
gether like fish in a tin. Their powerful fins were con-
torted at impossible angles and their heads, rising stiffly
above the surface of the water, were thrown back in an
awkward, agonized way. The strange acrid smell Lawler
had picked up in the doorway was theirs. It no longer
seemed so unpleasant now. The terrible grunting noises
were coming from the diver on the left. They were
grunts of purest pain.

“Oh, shit,” Lawler said quietly. He thought he under-
stood the Gillies’ rage now. Their blazing eyes, that men-
acing snort. A quick hot burst of anger went rippling
through him, setting up a brief twitching in his cheek.
“Shit!” He looked back toward the other man in disgust,
revulsion, and something close to hatred. “Delagard,
what have you done now?”

“Listen, if you think I brought you here just so you
could chew me out — ”

Lawler shook his head slowly. “What have you done,
man?” he said again, staring straight into Delagard’s sud-
denly flickering eyes. “What the fuck have you done?”

It was nitrogen absorption: Lawler didn’t have much
doubt of that. The frightful way in which the three divers
were twisted up was a clear signal. Delagard must have
had them working at some job deep down in the open
sea, keeping them down there long enough for their
joints, muscles, and fatty tissues to absorb immense quan-
tities of nitrogen; and then, unlikely as that seemed,
they evidently had come to the surface without taking
the proper time to decompress. The nitrogen, expanding
as the pressure dropped, had escaped into their blood-
streams and joints in the form of deadly bubbles.

“We brought them here as soon as we realized there
was trouble,” Delagard said. “Eiguring maybe you could
do something for them. And I thought, keep them in
water, they need to stay under water, so we filled this
tank and — ”

“Shut up,” Lawler said.

“I want you to know, we made every effort — ”

“Shut up. Please. Just shut up.”

Lawler stripped off the water-lettuce wrap he was
wearing and clambered into the tank. Water went splash-
ing over the side as he crowded himself in next to the
divers. But there wasn’t much that he could do for them.
The one in the middle was dead already: Lawler put his
hands to the creature’s muscular shoulders and felt the
rigor starting to take hold. The other two were more or

Robert Silverberg

less alive — so much the worse for them; they must be in
hideous pain, if they were conscious at all. The divers’
usually smooth torpedo-shaped bodies, longer than a
man’s, were bizarrely knotted, each muscle straining
against its neighbor, and their glistening golden skins,
normally slick and satiny, felt rough, full of little lumps.
Their amber eyes were dull. Their jutting underslung
jaws hung slack. A gray spittle covered their snouts. The
one on the left was still groaning steadily, every thirty
seconds or so, wrenching the sound up from the depths
of its guts in a horrifying way.

“Can you fix them somehow?” Delagard asked. “Is
there anything you can do at all? I know you can do it,
doc. I know you can.” There was an urgent wheedling
tone in Delagard’s voice now that Lawler couldn’t remem-
ber ever hearing in it before. Lawler was accustomed to
the way sick people would cede godlike power to a
doctor and beg for miracles. But why did Delagard care
so much for these divers? What was going on here, real-
ly? Surely Delagard didn’t feel guilty. Not Delagard.

Coldly Lawler said, “I’m no diver doctor. Doctoring
humans is all I know how to do. And I could stand to
be a whole lot better even at that than I am.”

“Try. Do something. Please.”

“One of them’s dead already, Delagard. I was never
trained to raise the dead. You want a miracle, go get
your friend Quillan the priest in here.”

“Christ,” Delagard muttered.

“Exactly. Miracles are his specialty, not mine.”

“Christ. Christ.”

Lawler felt carefully for pulses along the divers’
throats. Yes, still beating after a fashion, slow, uneven.
Did that mean they were moribund? He couldn’t say.
What the hell was a normal pulse, for a diver? How was
he supposed to know stuff like that? The only thing to
do, he thought, was to put the two that were still alive
back in the sea, get them down to the depths where
they had been, and bring them up again, slowly enough
this time so they could rid themselves of the excess ni-
trogen. But there was no way to manage that. And it
was probably too late anyway.

In anguish he made a futile, almost mystical passes
over the twisted bodies with his hands, as though he
could drive the nitrogen bubbles out by gesture alone.
“How deep were they?” Lawler asked, without looking up.

“We aren’t sure. Four hundred meters, maybe. Maybe
four-fifty. The bottom was irregular there and the sea
was moving around so we couldn’t keep close track of
how much line we’d paid out.”

Clear to the bottom of the sea. It was lunacy.

“What were you looking for?”

“Manganese nuggets,” Delagard said. “And there was
supposed to be molybdenum down there too, and may-
be some antimony. We trawled up a whole goddamned
menagerie of mineral samples with the scoop.”

“Then you should have used the scoop to bring your
manganese up,” said Lawler angrily. “Not these.”

He felt the right-hand diver ripple and convulse and
die as he held it. The other was still writhing, still moan-
ing.

A cold bitter fury took hold of him, fueled as much
by contempt as by wrath. This was murder, and stupid
unthinking murder at that. Divers were intelligent ani-
mals — not as intelligent as the Gillies, but intelligent
enough, surely smarter than dogs, smarter than horses,
smarter than any of the animals of old Earth that Lawler
had heard about in his storybook days. The seas of Hy-
dros were full of creatures that could be regarded as in-
telligent; that was one of the bewildering things about
this world, that it had evolved not just a single intelli-
gent species, but, apparently, dozens of them. The divers
had a language, they had names, they had some kind of
tribal structure. Unlike nearly all the other intelligent life-
forms on Hydros, though, they had a fatal flaw: they
were docile and even friendly around human beings,
gentle frolicking companions in the water. They could be
induced to do favors. They could be put to work, even.

They could be worked right to death, it seemed.

Desperately Lawler massaged the one that hadn’t yet
died, still hoping in a hopeless way that he could work
the nitrogen out of its tissues. For a moment its eyes
brightened and it uttered five or six words in the bark-
ing, guttural diver language. Lawler didn’t speak diver;
but the creature’s words were easy enough to guess at:
pain, grief, sorrow, loss, despair, pain. Then the amber
eyes glazed over again and the diver lapsed into silence.

Lawler said, as he worked on it, “Divers are adapted
for life in the deep ocean. Left to their own devices,
they’re smart enough to know not to rise from one pres-
sure zone to another too fast to handle the gases. Any
sea creature knows that, no matter how dumb it is. A
sponge would know that, let alone a diver. How did it
happen that these three came up so fast?”

“They got caught in the hoist,” Delagard said miser-
ably. “They were in the net and we didn’t know it until
it surfaced. Is there anything, anything at all that you
can do to save them, doc?”

“The other one on the end is dead too. This one has
maybe five minutes left. The only thing I can do is break
its neck and put it out of its misery,”

“Jesus.”

“Yeah. Jesus. What a shitty business.”

It took only an instant, one quick snap. Lawler
paused for a moment afterward, shoulders hunched for-
ward, exhaling, feeling a release himself as the diver
died. Then he climbed out of the tank, shook himself
off, and wrapped the water-lettuce garment around his
middle again. What he wanted now, and he wanted it
very badly, was a good shot of his numbweed tincture,
the pink drops that gave him peace of a sort. And a bath,
after having been in the tank with those dying beasts.
But his bath quota for the week was used up. A swim
would have to do, a little later on in the day. Though he
suspected it would take more than that to make him feel
clean again after what he had seen in here this morning.

He looked sharply at Delagard.

“These aren’t the first divers you’ve done this to, are
they?”

The stocky man didn’t meet his gaze.

“No.”

The Face of the Waters

“Don’t you have any sense? I know you don’t have
any conscience, but you might at least have sense. What
happened to the other ones?”

“They died.”

“I assume that they did. What did you do with the
bodies?”

“Made feed out of them.”

“Wonderful. How many?”

“It was a while ago. Four, five — I’m not sure.”

“That probably means ten. Did the Gillies find out
about it?”

Delagard’s “Yes” was the smallest possible audible
sound a man could have made.

“Yes,” Lawler mimicked. “Of course they found out.
The Gillies always know it when we fuck around with
the local fauna. So what did they say, when they found
out?”

“They warned me.” A little louder, not much, a sullen
under-the-breath naughty-schoolboy tone.

Here it comes, Lawler thought. We’re at the heart of it
at last.

“Warned you what?” he asked.

“Not to use divers in my operations any more.”

“But you did, is how it looks. Why the hell did you
do it again, if they warned you?”

“We changed the method. We didn’t think there’d be
any harm.” Some energy returned to Delagard’s voice.
“Listen, Lawler, do you know how valuable those miner-
al nuggets could be? They could revolutionize our entire
existence on this fucking watery hole of a planet! How
was I to know the divers would swim right into the god-
damned hoist net? How could I figure that they would
let themselves stay in it after we signaled that we were
lifting?”

“They didn’t let themselves stay in it. They must have
been tangled up in it. Intelligent diving animals just
don’t let themselves stay in a net that’s rising quickly
from four hundred meters.”

Delagard glared defiantly. “Well, they did. For what-
ever reason, I don’t know.” Then the glare faded, and
he offered Lawler the miracle-worker look again, eyes
rolling upward imploringly. Still hoping, even now?
“There was nothing whatever that you could have done
to save them, Lawler? Nothing at all?”

“Sure there was. There were all sorts of things I could
have done. I just wasn’t in the mood, I guess.”

“Sorry. That was dumb.” Delagard actually looked al-
most abashed. Huskily he said, “I know you did the best
you could. Look, if there’s anything I can send over to
your vaargh by way of payment, a case of grapeweed
brandy, maybe, or some good baskets, or a week’s sup-
ply of banger steaks — ”

“The brandy,” Lawler said. “That’s the best idea. So I
can get myself good and drunk and try to forget all about
what I saw here this morning.” He closed his eyes a mo-
ment. “The Gillies are aware that you’ve had three dying
divers in here all night.”

“They are? How can you possibly know that?”

“Because I ran into a few while I was wandering
around down by the bayshore, and they practically bit

my head off. They were frothing mad. You didn’t see
them chase me away?” Delagard, suddenly ashen-faced,
shook his head. “’Well, they did. And I hadn’t done any-
thing wrong, except maybe come a little too close to
their power plant. But they never indicated before that
the plant was off limits. So it must have been these
divers.”

“You think so?”

“What else could it be?”

“Sit down, then. We’ve got to talk, doc.”

“Not now.”

“Listen to me!”

“I don’t want to listen, okay? I can’t stick around here
any longer. I’ve got other things to do. People are prob-
ably waiting for me up at the vaargh. Hell, I haven’t even
had breakfast yet.”

“Doc, wait a second. Please.”

Delagard reached out to him, but Lawler shook him
off. Suddenly the hot moist air of the shed, tinged now
with the sweet odor of bodily decomposition, was sick-
ening to him. His head began to swirl. Even a doctor had
his limits. He stepped around the gaping Delagard and
went outside. Pausing just by the door, Lawler rocked
back and forth for a few moments, closing his eyes,
breathing deeply, listening to the grumbling of his emp-
ty stomach and the creaking of the pier beneath his feet,
until the sudden nausea had left him.

He spat. Something dry and greenish came up. He
scowled at it.

Jesus. Some start to the morning.

Daybreak had come by this time, the full show. With
Sorve this close to the equator, the sun rose swiftly
above the horizon in the morning and plummeted just
as abruptly at nightfall. It was an unusually magnificent
sky this morning, too. Bright pink streaks, interleaved
with tinges of orange and turquoise, were splashed
across the vault of the heavens. It looked almost like
Delagard’s sarong up there, Lawler thought. He had
calmed quickly once he was outside the shack in the
fresh sea air, but now he felt a new wave of rage churn-
ing within him, setting up bad resonances in his gut,
and he looked away, down toward his feet, taking deep
breaths again. What he needed to do, he told himself,
was to get himself home. Home, and breakfast, and per-
haps a drop or two of numbweed tincture. And then on
to the day’s rounds.

He began to head upslope.

Farther inland on the island, people were up, people
were moving around.

Nobody slept much past dawn here. The night was
for sleeping, the day for working. In the course of mak-
ing his way back toward his vaargh Lawler encountered
and greeted a significant percentage of the island’s en-
tire human population. Here at the narrow end where
the humans lived, everyone was on top of everyone else
all the time.

Most of those to whom he nodded as he walked up
the easy slope of the hard, bright yellow wickerwork
path were people he had known for decades. Practically

Robert Silverberg

all the population of Serve was Hydros-born, and more
than half of those had been born and raised right here
on this island, like Lawler himself. And so most of them
were people who had never specifically chosen to spend
their entire lives on this alien ball of water, but were do-
ing it anyway, because they hadn’t been given any choice.
The lottery of life had simply handed them a ticket to
Hydros at birth; and once you found yourself on Hydros
you couldn’t ever get off, because there were no space-
ports here, there was no way of leaving the planet ex-
cept by dying. It was a life sentence, being born here.
That was strange, in a galaxy full of habitable and in-
habited worlds, not to have had any choice about where
you would live. But then there were the others, the ones
who had come plummeting in from outside via drop-
capsule, who had had a choice, who could have gone
anywhere in the universe and had chosen to come here,
knowing that there was no going away again. That was
even stranger.

Dag Tharp, who ran the radio unit and did dental
work on the side and sometimes served as Lawler’s anes-
thesiologist, was the first to go by, a tiny angular man,
red-faced and fragile-looking, with a scraggy neck and a
big, sharply hooked nose emerging between little eyes
and practically fleshless lips. Behind him down the path
came Sweyner, the toolmaker and glassblower, a little
old fellow, knotted and gnarled, and his knotted, gnarled
wife, who looked like his twin sister. Some of the newer
settlers suspected that she was, but Lawler knew better.
Sweyner’s wife was Lawler’s second cousin, and Swey-
ner was no kin to him — or her — at all. The Sweyners,
like Tharp, were both Hydros-born, and native to Sorve.
It was a little irregular to marry a woman from your own
island, as Sweyner had done, and that — along with their
physical resemblance — accounted for the rumors.

Lawler was near the high spine of the island now, the
main terrace. A wide wooden ramp led to it. There were
no staircases on Sorve: the stubby inefficient legs of the
Gillies weren’t well designed for using stairs. Lawler
took the ramp at a quick pace and stepped out onto the
terrace, a flat stretch of stiff, hard, tightly bound yellow
sea-bamboo fibers fifty meters wide, varnished and lami-
nated with seppeltane sap and supported by a trellis of
heavy black kelp-timber beams. The island’s long, nar-
row central road cut across it. A left turn took you to the
part of the island where the Gillies lived, a right turn led
into the shantytown of the humans. He turned right.

Three women in a row came down the road, all of
them in loose green robes: Sisters Halla, Mariam, and
Theda, who a couple of years ago had formed some
sort of convent down at the tip of the island, past the
ashmasters’ yard, where bone of all sorts was stored to
be processed into lime and then into soap, ink, paint,
and chemicals of a hundred uses. No one but ashmas-
ters went there, ordinarily; the Sisters, living beyond the
boneyard, were safe from all disturbance. It was an odd
place to choose to live, all the same. Since setting up
their convent the Sisters had had as little to do with men
as they could manage. There were eleven of them alto-
gether by now, nearly a third of all the human women

on Sorve: a curious development, unique in the island’s
short history. Delagard was full of lewd speculations
about what went on down there. Very likely he was
right.

“Sister Halla,” he said, saluting. “Sister Mariam. Sister
Theda.”

They looked at him the way they might have done if he
had said something filthy. Lawler shrugged and went on.

The main reservoir was just up ahead, a covered cir-
cular tank three meters high and fifty meters across, con-
structed of varnished poles of sea-bamboo bound to-
gether with bright orange hoops of algae fronds and
caulked within with the red pitch that was made from
water-cucumbers. A berserk maze of wooden pipes
emerged from it and fanned out toward the vaarghs that
began just beyond it. The reservoir was probably the
most important structure in the settlement. The &st hu-
mans to get here had built it, five generations ago in the
early twenty-fourth century when Hydros was still being
used as a penal colony, and it required constant mainte-
nance, endless patching and caulking and rehooping.
There had been talk for at least ten years of replacing it
with something more elegantly made, but nothing had
ever been done about it, and Lawler doubted that any-
thing ever would. It served its purpose well enough.

As Lawler approached the great wooden tank he saw
the priest who had lately come to live on Hydros, Father
Quillan of the Church of All Worlds, edging slowly
around it from the far side, doing something extremely
strange. Every ten paces or thereabouts Quillan would
halt, face the reservoir wall, and stretch his arms out
against it in a sort of hug, pressing his fingertips thought-
fully against the wall here and there as though probing
for leaks.

“Afraid that the wall’s going to pop?” Lawler called to
him. The priest was an of^fworlder, a newcomer. He had
been on Hydros less than a year and had arrived on
Sorve Island only a few weeks before. “You don’t need
to worry about that.”

Quillan looked quickly around, visibly embarrassed.
He took his hands away from the side of the reservoir.

“Hello, Lawler.”

The priest was a compact, austere-looking man, bald-
ing and clean-shaven, who might have been any age at
all between forty-five and sixty. He was thin, as if all the
flesh had been sweated off him, with a long oval face
and a strong, bony nose. His eyes, set deep in their
sockets, were a chilly light blue and his skin was very
pale, almost bleached-looking, though a steady diet of
the maritime-derived things that people ate on Hydros
was starting to give him the dusky sea-tinged complex-
ion that the old-time settlers had: the algae cropping out
in the skin, so to speak.

Lawler said, “The reservoir’s extremely sturdy. Believe
me. Father. I’ve lived here all my life and that reservoir
hasn’t burst its walls even once. We couldn’t afford to
let that happen.”

Quillan laughed self-consciously. “That isn’t what I
was doing, actually. I was embracing its strength, as a
matter of fact.”

The Face of the Waters

“I see.”

“Feeling all that contained power. Experiencing a sense
of great force under restraint — tons of water held back
by nothing more than human will and determination.”

“And a lot of sea-bamboo and hooping, Father. Not
to mention God’s grace.”

“That too,” Quillan said.

Very peculiar, hugging the reservoir because you
wanted to experience its strength. But Quillan was al-
ways doing curious things like that. There seemed to be
some kind of desperate hunger in the man: for grace, for
mercy, for surrender to something larger than himself.
For faith itself, perhaps. It seemed odd to Lawler that a
man who claimed to be a priest would be so needy of
spirit.

He said, “My great-great-grandfather designed it, you
know. Harry Lawler, one of the Founders. He could do
anything he put his mind to, my grandfather used to say.
Take out your appendix, sail a ship from one island to
another, design a reservoir.” Lawler paused. “He was
sent here for murder, old Harry was. Manslaughter, I
should say.”

“I didn’t know. So your family has always lived on
Sorve?”

“Since the beginning. I was born here. Just about a
hundred eighty meters from where we’re standing, actu-
ally.” Lawler slapped the side of the reservoir affection-
ately. “Good old Harry. We’d be in real trouble here with-
out this. You see how dry our climate is.”

“I’m starting to find out,” said the priest. “Doesn’t it
ever rain here at all?”

“Certain times of the year,” Lawler said. “This isn’t
one of the times. You won’t see any rain around here
for another nine, ten months. That’s why we took care
to build our reservoirs so that they wouldn’t spring any
leaks.”

Water was scarce on Sorve: the kind of water that hu-
mans could use, at any rate. The island traveled through
arid territory most of the year. That was the work of the
inexorable currents. The floating islands of Hydros, though
they drifted more or less freely in the sea, were never-
theless penned for decades at a time within clearly de-
fined longitudinal belts by powerful ocean currents,
strong as great rivers. Every year each island carried out
a rigidly defined migration from one pole to the other
and back again; each pole was surrounded by a vortex
of swift water that seized the incoming islands, swung
them around, and sent them off toward the opposite end
of the planet. But though the islands passed through ev-
ery latitudinal belt in their annual north-south migra-
tions, east-west fluctuations were minimal because of
the force of the prevailing currents. Sorve, in its endless
traveling up and down the world, had stayed between
the fortieth and sixtieth degrees of west longitude as
long as Lawler could remember. That seemed basically
to be an arid belt in most latitudes. Rain was infrequent
except when the island was moving through the polar
zones, where heavy downfalls were the rule.

The almost perpetual droughts were no problem for
the Gillies, who were constmcted for drinking seawater

anyway. But they made existence complicated for the
humans. Water rationing was a routine fact of life on
Sorve. There had been two years — ^when Lawler was
twelve, and again when he was twenty, the dark year of
his father’s death — ^when freakish rainfall had pelted the
island for weeks without ceasing, so that the reservoirs
had overflowed and the rationing had been abandoned.
That had been an interesting novelty for the first week
or so, each time, and then the unending downpours, the
gray days and the rank smell of mildew, had become a
bore. On the whole Lawler preferred drought: he was
accustomed to it, at least.

Quillan said, “This place fascinates me. It’s the strang-
est world I’ve ever known.”

“I could say the same thing, I suppose.”

“Have you traveled much? Around Hydros, I mean?”

“I was on Thibeire Island once,” Lawler said. “It came
very close, floated up right out there in the harbor, and
a bunch of us took a coracle over to it and spent the
whole day there. I was fifteen, then. That’s the only time
I’ve been anywhere else.” He gave Quillan a wary glance.
“But you’re a real traveler, I understand. They tell me
you’ve seen quite a chunk of the galaxy in your day.”

“Some,” Quillan said. “Not all that much. I’ve been to
seven worlds altogether. Eight, counting this one.”

“That’s seven more than I’ll ever see.”

“But now I’ve reached the end of the line.”

“Yes,” Lawler said. “That you certainly have.”

Offworlders who came to live on Hydros were be-
yond Lawler’s comprehension. Why did they do it? To
let yourself be stuffed into a drop-capsule on Sunrise,
next door in the sky just a dozen or so million kilome-
ters away, and be flipped out into a landing orbit that
would dump you down in the sea near one of the float-
ing islands — knowing that you could never leave Hy-
dros again? Since the Gillies refused to countenance the
building of a spaceport anywhere on Hydros, coming
here was strictly a one-way journey, and everyone out
there understood that. But still they came — not many,
but a steady trickle of them, choosing to live forever af-
ter as castaways on a shoreless shore, on a world with-
out trees or flowers, birds or insects or green fields of
grass, without furry animals or hooved ones — ^without
ease, without comfort, without any of the benefits of
modern technology, awash on the ceaseless tides, drift-
ing from pole to pole and back again aboard islands
made of wickerwork on a world fit only for creatures
with fins or flippers.

Lawler had no idea why Quillan had wanted to come
to Hydros, but it wasn’t the thing you asked someone. A
kind of penance, perhaps. An act of self-abnegation. Cer-
tainly it wasn’t to perform church functions. The Church
of All Worlds was a schismatic post-Papal Catholic sect
without any adherents, so far as Lawler knew, anywhere
on the planet. Nor did the priest seem to be here as a
missionary. He had made no attempts to make converts
since his arrival on Sorve, which was just as well, for re-
ligion had never been a matter of interest among the is-
landers. “God is very far away from us on Sorve Island,”
Lawler’s father had liked to say.

Robert Silverberg

Quillan looked somber for a moment, as though con-
templating the realities of his having stranded himself on
Hydros for the rest of his days. Then he said, “You don’t
mind always staying in the same place? You don’t ever
get restless? Curious about the other islands?”

“Not really,” Lawler said. “Thibeire was pretty much
like Sorve, I thought. The same general layout, the same
general feel. Only there was nobody there that I knew.

If one place is just like another, why not stay in the place
you know, among the people you’ve always lived with?”
His eyes narrowed. “It’s the other worlds I wonder about.
The dry-land ones. Actual solid planets. I wonder what
it’s like to go and go for days and never see open water
even once, to be on a hard surface all the time, not just
an island but a whole huge continent where you can’t
see right across from one end of the place where you
live to the other, an enormous land mass that has cities
and mountains and rivers on it. Those are just empty
words to me. Cities. Mountains. I’d like to know what
trees are like, and birds, and plants that have flowers. I
wonder about Earth, you know? I dream sometimes that
it still exists, that I’m actually on it, breathing its air, feel-
ing its soil under my feet. Getting it under my finger-
nails. There’s no soil anywhere on Hydros, do you real-
ize that? Only the sand of the sea bottom.”

Lawler glanced quickly at the priest’s hands, at his
fingernails, as though they might still have the black dirt
of Sunrise under them. Quillan’s eyes followed Lawler’s,
and he smiled but said nothing.

Lawler said, “I overheard you talking last week with
Delagard at the community center, about the planet you
lived on before you came here, and I still remember ev-
ery word of what you said. How the land there seems to
go on forever, first grassland and then a forest and then
mountains and a desert on the far side of the mountains.
And the whole time I sat there trying to imagine what all
those things really looked like. But of course I’ll never
know. We can’t get to other worlds from here, eh? For
us they might just as well not exist. And since every
place on Hydros is the same as every other place. I’m
not inclined to go roaming.”

“Indeed,” said Quillan gravely. After a moment he
added, “That isn’t typical, is it, though?”

“Typical of whom?”

“The people who live on Hydros. Never traveling any-
where, I mean.”

“A few of us are wanderers. They like to change is-
lands every five or six years. Some aren’t like that. Most
aren’t. I’d say. At any rate I’m one of the ones who isn’t.”

Quillan considered that.

“Indeed,” he said again, as though processing some
intricate datum. He appeared to have exhausted his run
of questions for the moment. Some weighty conclusion
seemed about to come forth.

Lawler watched him without great interest, politely
waiting to hear what else Quillan might have to say.

But a long moment passed and Quillan was still
silent. Evidently he had nothing further to say after all.

“Well,” Lawler said, “time to open up the shop, I
guess.”

He began to walk up the path toward the vaarghs.

As he drew near his vaargh Lawler saw that a woman
with long, straight dark hair was waiting for him out-
side.

There were thirty vaarghs in the group where Lawler
lived, and another sixty or so, not all of them inhabited,
down near the tip of the island. They were irregular
gray structures, asymmetrical but roughly pyramidal in
shape, hollow within, twice the height of a tall man and
tapering to a blunt drooping point. Near their summits
they were pierced with windowlike openings, angled
outward so that rain would enter only in the most driv-
ing of storms, and then with difficulty. Some kind of
thick, rugged cellulose, puckered and coarse — some-
thing drawn from the sea; where else but from the sea?
— ^was what they had been made from, evidently very
long ago. The stuff was remarkably solid and durable. If
you struck a vaargh with a stick, it rang like a metal
bell. The first settlers had found them already here when
they arrived and had put them to use as temporary hous-
ing; but that had been more than a hundred years be-
fore, and the islanders were still living in them. Nobody
knew why they were here. There were clusters of vaarghs
on nearly every island: the abandoned nests, perhaps, of
some extinct creature that had once shared the islands
with the Gillies. The Gillies lived in dwellings of an en-
tirely different nature, casual seaweed shelters that they
discarded and replaced every few weeks, whereas these
things seemed as close to imperishable as anything was
on this watery world. “What are they?” the early settlers
had asked, and the Gillies had replied, simply, “They
are vaarghs.” What “vaarghs” meant was anybody’s
guess. Communicating with the Gillies, even now, was a
haphazard business.

When Lawler came closer he saw that the woman
waiting for him was Sundira Thane. Like the priest, she
too was a newcomer to Sorve, a tall, serious young
woman who had arrived from Kentrup Island a few
months before as a passenger aboard one of Delagard’s
ships.

“Am I too early?” she asked.

“Not if you don’t think you are. Come in.” The en-
trance to Lawler’s vaargh was a low triangular gash in
the wall, like a doorway for gnomes. He crouched and
shuffled through it. She came crouching and shuffling
after him. She was nearly as tall as he was. She seemed
tense, withdrawn, preoccupied.

Pale morning light came slanting into the vaargh. At
ground level thin partitions made of the same material
as the exterior divided it into three rooms, each small
and sharp-angled — his medical office, his bedchamber,
and an antechamber that he used as a sitting-room.

It was still only about seven in the morning. Lawler
was getting hungry. Breakfast would have to wait a
while longer, he realized. But he casually shook a few
drops of numbweed tincture into a mug, added a little
water, and sipped it as though it were nothing but some

The Face of the Waters

medicine he prescribed for his own use every morning.
In a way it was.

The drug’s powerful alkaloids had completed their
swift circuit of his bloodstream almost at once and en-
tered his brain. He felt the tensions of the dawn encoun-
ters ebbing from his spirit.

“I’ve been coughing,” Thane said. “It won’t stop.”

And virtually on cue she broke into a volley of rough,
hacking rasps. On Hydros a cough might be as trivial a
thing as it was anywhere else; but it might also be some-
thing serious. All the islanders knew that.

There was a parasitic waterborne fungus, usually
found in northern temperate waters, which reproduced
by infesting various forms of marine life with the spores
that it released into the atmosphere in dense black clouds.
A spore, when inhaled by some aquatic mammal as it
came to the surface to breathe, lodged in its host’s warm
gullet and sprouted immediately, sending forth a dense
tangle of bright red hyphae that had no difficulty pene-
trating lungs, intestines, stomach, even brain tissue. The
host’s interior became a tightly packed mass of vivid
scarlet wires. The wires were looking for the copper-
based respiratory pigment, hemocyanin. Most of the sea
creatures of Hydros had hemocyanin in their blood,
which gave it a bluish color. The fungus seemed to have
some use for hemocyanin too.

Death by fungus infestation was slow and horrible.
The host, bloated with gases excreted by the invader
and floating helplessly, would eventually succumb, and
soon after that the fungus would extrude its mature
fmiting structure through an opening it had carved in
the host’s abdomen. This was a globular woody mass
that shortly would split apart to release the new genera-
tion of adult fungi, which in the course of time would
produce fresh clouds of spores, and so the cycle went.

Killer-fungus spores were capable of taking root in
human lungs, a situation of no value to either party: hu-
mans were unable to provide the fungus with the hemo-
cyanin it desired and the fungus found it necessary to
invade and consume every region of the host’s body
during the course of its search, a useless expenditure of
energy.

The first symptom of fungus infestation in a human
was a cough that refused to go away.

“Let’s get a little information about you,” Lawler said.
“And then we’ll check this thing out.”

He took a fresh records folder from a drawer and
scrawled Sundira Thane’s name on it.

“Your age?” he asked.

“Thirty-one.”

“Birthplace?”

“Khamsilaine Island.”

He glanced up. “That’s on Hydros?”

“Yes,” she said, a little too irritably. “Of course.” An-
other siege of coughing took her. “You’ve never heard
of Khamsilaine?” she asked, when she could speak again.

“There are a lot of islands. I don’t get around much.
I’ve never heard of it, no. What sea does it move in?”

“The Azure.”

“The Azure,” Lawler said, marveling. He had only the

haziest idea where the Azure Sea might be. “Imagine
that. You’ve really covered some territory, haven’t you?”
She offered no reply. He said, after a moment, “You
came here from Kentrup a little while back, is that right?”

“Yes.” More coughing.

“How long did you live there?”

“Three years.”

“And before that?”

“Eighteen months on Velmise. Two years on Shaktan.
About a year on Simbalimak.” She looked at him coldly
and said, “Simbalimak’s in the Azure Sea also.”

“I’ve heard of Simbalimak,” he said.

“Before that, Khamsilaine. So this is my sixth island.”

“Ever married?”

“No.”

He noted that down too. The general distaste for mar-
rying within one’s own island’s population had led to a
custom of unofficial exogamy on Hydros. Single people
looking to get married usually moved to some other is-
land to find a mate. When a woman as attractive as Sun-
dira Thane had done as much moving around as she had
without ever marrying anyone, it meant either that she
was very particular or else that she wasn’t looking at all.

Lawler suspected that she simply wasn’t looking. The
only man he had noticed her spending time with, in her
few months on Sorve, was Gabe Kinverson, the fisher-
man. The moody, untalkative, crag-faced Kinverson was
strong and rugged and, Lawler supposed, interesting in
an animal sort of way, but he wasn’t the kind of man
that Lawler imagined a woman like Sundira Thane
would want to marry, assuming that marriage was what
she was after. And in any case Kinverson had never
been the marrying sort himself.

“When did this coughing start?” he asked.

“Eight, ten days ago.”

“You ever experience anything like it before?”

“No, never.”

“Fever, pains in the chest, chilly sensations?”

“No.”

“Does any sputum come up when you cough? Or
blood?”

“Sputum? Fluid, do you mean? No, there hasn’t been
any sort of — ”

She went into yet another coughing fit, the worst one
yet. Her eyes grew watery, her cheeks reddened, her
whole body seemed to shake. Afterward she sat with
her head bowed forward between her shoulders, look-
ing weary and miserable.

Lawler waited for her to catch her breath.

She said finally, “We haven’t been in the latitudes
where killer fungus grows. I keep telling myself that.”

“That doesn’t signify, you know. The spores travel
thousands of kilometers on the wind.”

“Thanks a lot.”

“You don’t seriously think you’ve got killer fungus,
do you?”

She looked up, almost glaring at him. “Do I know? I
might be full of red wires from my chest to my toes, and
how would I be able to tell? All I know is that I can’t
stop coughing. You’re the one who can tell me why.”

Robert Silverberg

“Maybe,” Lawler said. “Maybe not. But let’s have a
look. Get your shirt off.”

He drew his stethoscope from a drawer.

It was a preposterously crude instrument, nothing
more than a cylinder of sea-bamboo twenty centimeters
long to which a pair of plastic earpieces at the ends of
two flexible tubes had been affixed. Lawler had next to
nothing in the way of modern medical equipment at his
service, scarcely anything, in fact, that a doctor even of
the twentieth or twenty-first century would have regard-
ed as modem. He had to make do with primitive things,
medieval equipment. An X-ray scan could have told him
in a couple of seconds whether she had a fungus infes-
tation. But where would he get an X-ray scanner? On
Hydros there was so little contact with the greater uni-
verse beyond the sky, and no import-export trade what-
ever. They were lucky to have any medical equipment
here at all. Or any doctors, even half-baked ones like
him. The human settlement here was inherently impov-
erished. There were so few people, such a shallow res-
ervoir of skills.

Stripped to the waist, she stood beside his examining
table, watching him as he slipped the stethoscope’s col-
lar around his neck. She was very slender, almost too
thin; her arms were long, muscular the way a thin wom-
an’s arms are muscular, with flat, hard little muscles; her
breasts were small and high and far apart. Her features
were compressed in the center of her wide strong-boned
face, small mouth, thin lips, narrow nose, cool gray eyes.
Lawler wondered why he had thought she was attrac-
tive. Certainly there was nothing conventionally pretty
about her. It’s the way she carries herself, he decided:
the head thmst forward a little atop the long neck, the
strong jaw outthrust, the eyes quick, alert, busy. She
seemed vigorous, even aggressive. To his surprise he
found himself aroused by her, not because her body
was half bare — there was nothing uncommon about nu-
dity, partial or otherwise, on Sorve Island — ^but because
of the vitality and strength she projected.

It was a long time since he had been involved in any
way with any woman. These days the celibate life seemed
ever so much the simplest way, free of pain and mess
once you got past the initial feelings of isolation and
bleakness, if you could, and he eventually had. He had
never had much luck with liaisons, anyway. His one mar-
riage, when he was twenty-three, had lasted less than a
year. Everything that had followed had been fragmen-
tary, casual, incidental. Pointless, really.

The little flurry of endocrine excitement passed quick-
ly. In a moment he was professional again. Dr. Lawler
making an examination.

He said, “Open your mouth, very very wide.”

“There isn’t all that much to open.”

“Well, do your best.”

She gaped at him. He had a little tube with a light on
it, something handed down to him by his father; the tiny
battery had to be recharged every few days. He put it
down her throat and peered through it.

“Am I full of red wires?” she asked, when he with-
drew it.

“Doesn’t look that way. All I see is a little soreness in
the vicinity of the epiglottis, nothing very unusual.”

“What’s the epiglottis?”

“The flap that guards your glottis. Don’t worry about
it.”

He put the stethoscope’s end against her sternum and
listened.

“Can you hear the wires growing in there?”

“Shh.”

Lawler moved the cylinder slowly around the hard,
flat area between her breasts, listening to her heart, and
then out along the rib cage.

“I’m trying to pick up audible evidence of inflamma-
tion of the pericardium,” he told her. “Which is the sac
surrounding the heart. I’m also listening for the sounds
produced in the air tubes and sacs of your lungs. Take a
deep breath and hold it. Try not to cough.”

Instantly, unsurprisingly, she began to cough. Lawler
held the stethoscope to her as the coughing went on
and on. Any information was information. Eventually the
coughing stopped, leaving her red-faced and weary
again.

“Sorry,” she said. “It was like when you said. Don’t
cough, that it was a signal of some kind to my brain and
I—”

She began to cough again.

“Easy,” he said. “Easy.”

This time the attack was shorter. He listened, nodded,
listened again. Everything sounded normal.

But he had never had a case of killer-fungus infesta-
tion to handle. All Lawler knew about it was what he
heard from his father long ago or learned by talking to
doctors from other islands. Would the stethoscope really
be able to tell him, he wondered, what might or might
not have taken up residence in her lungs?

“Turn around,” he said.

He listened to the sounds of her back. He had her
raise her arms and pressed his fingers against her sides,
feeling for alien growths. She wriggled as though he
were tickling her. He drew a blood sample from her
arm, and sent her behind the screen in the comer of the
room to give him a urine specimen. Lawler had a micro-
scope of sorts, which Sweyner the toolmaker had fash-
ioned for him. It had no more resolution than a toy, but
perhaps if there were something living within her he
would be able to see it anyway.

He knew so little, really.

His patients were a daily reproach to his skills. Much
of the time he simply had to bluff his way. His medical
knowledge was a feeble mix of hand-me-downs from
his eminent father, desperate guesswork, and hard-won
experience, gradually accumulated at his patients’ ex-
pense. Lawler had been only halfway through his medi-
cal education when his father died and he, at not quite
twenty, found himself doctor to the island of Sorve. No-
where on Hydros was there real medical training to be
had, or anything that could remotely be considered a
modern medical instmment, or any medicines other than
those he could compound himself out of marine life-
forms, imagination, and prayers. In his late and great

The Face of the Waters

father’s time some charitable organization on Sunrise
had dropped packages of medical supplies once in a
while, but the packages were few and far between and
they had to be shared among many islands. And they
had stopped coming long ago. The inhabited galaxy was
very large; nobody thought much about the people liv-
ing on Hydros any more. Lawler did his best, but his
best often wasn’t good enough. When he had the chance,
he consulted with doctors on other islands, hoping to
learn something from them. Their medical skills were
just as muddy as his, but he had learned that sometimes
by exchanging ignorances with them he could generate
a little spark of understanding. Sometimes.

“You can put your shirt back on,” Lawler said.

“Is it the fungus, do you think?”

“All it is is a nervous cough,” he told her. He had the
blood sample on the glass slide, now, and was peering
at it through the single eyepiece. What was that, red on
red? Could they be scarlet mycelial fibers coiling through
the crimson haze? No. No. A trick of his eye. This was
normal blood. “You’re perfectly all right,” he said, look-
ing up. She was still bare-breasted, her shirt over her
skinny arm, frozen in suspense. Her expression was a
suspicious one. “Why do you need to think you’ve got a
horrible disease?” Lawler asked. “All it is is a cough.”

“I need to think I don’t have a horrible disease. That’s
why I came to you.”

“Well, you don’t.” He hoped to God he was right.
There was no real reason to think he wasn’t.

He watched her as she dressed, and found himself
wondering whether there might actually be something
going on between her and Gabe Kinverson. Lawler, who
had little interest in island gossip, hadn’t considered that
possibility before, and, considering it now, he was star-
tled to observe how uncomfortable he was with it.

He said, “Have you been under any unusual stress
lately?”

“Not that I’m aware of, no.”

“Working too hard? Sleeping badly? Love affair that
isn’t going well?”

She shot him a peculiar look. “No. On all three.”

“Well, sometimes we get stressed out and we don’t
even notice it. The stress becomes built-in, part of our
routine. What I’m saying is that I think this is a nervous
cough.”

“That’s all?” She sounded disappointed.

“You want it to be a killer-fungus infestation? All
right, it’s a killer-fungus infestation. When you reach the
stage where the wiry red threads are coming out your
ears, cover your head in a sack so you don’t upset your
neighbors. They might think they were at risk, other-
wise. But of course they won’t be, not until you begin
giving off spores, and that’ll come much later.”

She laughed. “I didn’t know you were such a come-
dian.”

“I’m not.” Lawler took her hand in his, wondering
whether he was trying to be provocative or simply be-
ing avuncular, his Good Old Doc Lawler persona. “Lis-
ten,” he said, “I can’t find anything wrong with you
physically. So the odds are the cough is just a nervous

habit you picked up somehow. Once you start doing it,
you irritate the throat linings, the mucosa and such, and
the cough starts feeding on itself and gets worse and
worse. Eventually it’ll go away of its own, but eventually
can be a long time. What I’m going to give you is a neu-
ral damper, a tranquilizer drug, something to calm your
cough reflex down long enough to let the mechanical ir-
ritation subside, so that you’ll stop sending cough sig-
nals to yourself.”

That came as a surprise to him too, that he would
share the numbweed with her. He had never said a word
about it to anyone, let alone prescribed it for a patient.
But giving her the drug seemed to be the right thing to
do. He had enough to spare.

He took a small dry storage gourd from his cabinet,
poured a couple of centiliters of the pink fluid into it,
and capped it with a twist of sea-plastic.

“This is a dmg I derived myself from numbweed,
which is one of the algae that grows in the lagoon. Give
yourself five or six drops of it every morning, no more,
in a glass of water. It’s strong stuff.” He studied her with
a close, searching look. “The plant is full of potent alka-
loids that could knock you for a loop. Just nibble one
frond of it and you’d be unconscious for a week. Or
maybe forever. This is a highly diluted extract, but be
careful with it anyway.”

“You had a little of it yourself, didn’t you, right when
we first came in here?”

So she’d been paying attention after all. Quick eyes, a
sharp observer. Interesting.

“I get nervous too now and then,” Lawler said.

“Do I make you nervous?”

“All my patients do. I don’t really know much about
medicine, and I’d hate for them to find that out.” He
forced a laugh. “No, that isn’t true. I don’t know as much
about medicine as I should, but I know enough to man-
age. But I find that the drug calms me when I’m not hav-
ing a good morning, and today didn’t start off particular-
ly well for me. It had nothing to do with you. Here, you
might as well take your first dose right now.”

He measured it out for her. She sipped carefully, un-
easily, and made a wry face as the curious sweet taste of
the alkaloids registered on her.

“You feel the effect?”

“Right away! Hey, good stuff!”

“Too good, maybe. A little insidious.” He made notes
on her dossier. “Five drops in a glass of water every
morning, no more, and you don’t get a refill until the
first of the month.”

“Aye, aye, sir!”

Her entire facial expression had changed; she looked
much more relaxed now, the cool gray eyes warmer, al-
most twinkling, the lips not so tightly pursed, the tense
cheek muscles allowed a little slack. She looked younger.
She looked prettier. Lawler had never had a chance be-
fore to observe the effects of numbweed on anyone
else. They were unexpectedly dramatic.

She said, “How did you discover this drug?”

“The Gillies use numbweed as a muscle relaxant when
they’re hunting meatfish in the bay.”

Robert Silverberg

“The Dwellers, you mean?”

The prissy correction caught Lawler by surprise. “Dwell-
ers” was what the dominant native life-forms of Hydros
called themselves. But “Gillies” was what anyone who
had been on Hydros more than a few months called
them, at least around here. Maybe the usage was differ-
ent on the island where she was from, he thought, off in
the Azure Sea. Or perhaps it was what the younger peo-
ple were saying now. Usages changed. He reminded
himself that he was ten years older than she was. But
most likely she used the formal term out of respect, be-
cause she fancied herself a student of Gillie culture.

What the hell: whichever way she liked it, he’d try to be
accommodating.

“The Dwellers, yes,” he said. “They tear off a couple
of strands and wrap them around a chunk of bait and
toss it to the meatfish, and when the meatfish swallow
them they go limp and float helplessly to the surface.
Then the Dwellers move in and harvest them without
having to worry about those knifeblade-tipped tentacles.
An old sailor named Jolly told me about it, when I was
a boy. Later on I remembered it and went out to the har-
bor and watched them doing it. And collected some of
the weed and experimented with it. I thought I might be
able to use it as an anesthetic.”

“And could you?”

“For meatfish, yes. I don’t do much surgery on meat-
fish, though. What I found when I used it on humans
was that any dose that was strong enough to be any
good as an anesthetic also turned out to be lethal.” Law-
ler smiled grimly. “My trial-and-error period as a surgeon.
Mostly error. But I eventually discovered that an ex-
tremely dilute tincture was an extremely potent tranquil-
izer. As you now see. It’s terrific stuff. We could market
it throughout the galaxy, if we had any way of shipping
anything anywhere.”

“And nobody knows about this dmg but you?”

“And the Gillies,” he said. “Pardon me. The Dwellers.
And now you. I don’t get much call for tranquilizers
here.”

“You may get some now,” she told him. ‘T think the
Dwellers are about to make some trouble. They’re pretty
seriously annoyed with us.”

“What about?” Lawler asked.

“I don’t know. But something’s definitely making them
itchy. I went down to their end of the island last night
and they were having a big conference. When they saw
me they weren’t at all friendly.”

“Are they ever?”

“With me they are. But they wouldn’t even talk with
me last night. They wouldn’t let me near them. And they
were holding themselves in the posture of displeasure.
You know anything about Dweller body-language? They
were stiff as boards.”

The divers, he thought. They must know about the
divers. That has to be it. But it wasn’t something that
Lawler wanted to discuss right now, not with her, not
with anyone.

“The thing about aliens,” he said, “is that they’re alien.
Even when we think we understand them, we really

don’t understand a damned thing. And I don’t see any
way around that problem. Listen, if the cough doesn’t
go away in two or three days, come back here and I’ll
run some more tests. But stop fretting about killer fun-
gus in your lungs, okay? Whatever it is, it isn’t that.”

“That’s good to hear,” she said. She went over to the
shelf where he kept his little collection of ancient arti-
facts. “Are all these little things from Earth?”

“Yes. My great-great-grandfather collected them.”

“Really? Actual Earth things?” Gingerly she touched
the Egyptian statuette and the bit of stone that had come
from some important wall, Lawler forgot where. “Actual
things that came from Earth. I’ve never seen any before.
Earth doesn’t even seem real to me, you know? It never
has.”

“It does to me,” Lawler said. “But I know a lot of peo-
ple who feel the way you do. Let me know about that
cough, okay?”

She thanked him and went out.

And now for breakfast, Lawler told himself. Finally. A
nice whipfish filet, and algae toast, and some freshly
squeezed managordo juice.

But he had waited too long. He didn’t have much ap-
petite, and he simply nibbled at his meal.

A little while later a second patient appeared outside
the vaargh. Brondo Katzin, who ran the island’s fish mar-
ket, had picked up a not-quite-dead arrowfish the wrong
way and had a thick, glossy black spine five centimeters
long sticking right through the middle of his left hand
from one side to the other. “Imagine, being so dumb,”
the barrel-chested, slow-witted Katzin kept saying. “Imag-
ine.” His eyes were bugging with pain and his hand,
swollen and glossy, looked twice its normal size. Lawler
cut the spine loose, swabbed the wound all the way
through to get the poison and other irritants out, and
gave the fish-market man some gemberweed pills to ease
the pain. Katzin stared at his puffed-up hand, ruefully
shaking his head. “So dumb,” he said again.

Lawler hoped that he had cleaned out enough of the
trlchomes to keep the wound from getting infected. If
he hadn’t, there was a good chance Katzin would lose
the hand, or the whole arm. Practicing medicine was
probably easier, Lawler thought, on a planet that had
some land surface, and a spaceport, and something in
the way of contemporary technology. But he did his
best with what he had. Heigh-ho! The day was under
way.

At midday Lawler came out of his vaargh to take a little
break from his work. This had been his busiest morning
in months. On an island with a total human population
of just seventy-eight, most of them pretty healthy, Law-
ler sometimes went through whole days, or even longer,
without seeing a single patient. On such days he might
spend the morning wading in the bay, collecting algae
of medicinal value. The algae-farmer Natim Gharkid of-
ten helped him, pointing out this or that useful plant. Or

The Face of the Waters

sometimes he did nothing at all, strolled or swam or
went out on the bay in a fishing boat or sat quietly
watching the sea. But this wasn’t one of those days. First
there was Dana Sawtelle’s little boy with a fever, then
Marya Main with cramps after eating too many crawlie-
oysters last night, Nimber Tanimind suffering from a re-
currence of his usual tremors and megrims, young Bard
Thalheim with a badly sprained ankle as a result of
some unwise hijinks on the slippery side of the seawall.
Lawler uttered the appropriate spells and applied the
most likely ointments and sent them all away with the
customary reassurances and prognostications. Most like-
ly they’d feel better in a day or so. The current Dr. Law-
ler might not be much of a practitioner, but Dr. Placebo,
his invisible assistant, generally managed to take care of
the patients’ problems sooner or later.

Now, though, there was no one else waiting to see
him and a little fresh air seemed like a good prescription
for the doctor himself. Lawler stepped into the bright
noontime sun, stretched, did a few pinwheels with his
extended arms. He peered downslope toward the water-
front. There was the bay, friendly and familiar, its calm
enclosed waters rippling gently. It looked wonderfully
beautiful just now: a glassy sheet of luminous gold, a
glowing mirror. The dark fronds of the varied sea flora
waved lazily in the shallows. Farther out, occasional
shining fins breached the glistening surface. A couple of
Delagard’s ships lolled by the shipyard pier, swaying
gently to the rhythm of the easy tide. Lawler felt as
though this moment of summer noon could go on for-
ever, that night and winter would never come again. An
unexpected feeling of peace and well-being infiltrated
his soul: a gift, a bit of serendipitous joy.

“Lawler,” a voice said from his left.

A dry frayed croak of a voice, a boneyard voice, a
voice that was all ashes and rubble. It was a dismal
burned-out unrecognizable wreck of a voice that Lawler
recognized, somehow, as that of Nid Delagard.

He had come up along the southern path from the
waterfront and was standing between Lawler’s vaargh
and the little tank where Lawler kept his current stock
of freshly picked medicinal algae. He was flushed and
rumpled and sweaty and his eyes looked strangely
glassy, as though he had had a stroke.

“What the hell has happened now?” Lawler asked, ex-
asperated.

Delagard made a wordless gaping movement with his
mouth, like a fish out of water, and said nothing.

Lawler dug his fingers into the man’s thick, meaty
arm. “Can you speak? Come on, damn you. Tell me
what’s happened.”

“Yeah. Yeah.” Delagard moved his head from side to
side in a slow, ponderous, pole-axed way. “It’s very bad.
It’s worse than I ever imagined.”

“What is?”

“Those fucking divers. The Gillies are really furious
about them. And they’re going to come down on us
very hard. Very very very hard. It’s what I was trying to
tell you about this morning in the shed, when you
walked out on me.”

Lawler blinked a couple of times. “What in God’s
name are you talking about?”

“Give me some brandy first.”

“Yeah. Yeah. Come inside.”

He poured a strong jolt of the thick sea-colored liquor
for Delagard, and, after a moment’s consideration, a
smaller drink for himself. Delagard put his away in a
single gulp and held out the cup. Lawler poured again.

After a little while Delagard said, picking his way war-
ily through his words as if struggling with some speech
impediment, “The Gillies came to visit me just now,
about a dozen of them. Walked right up out of the wa-
ter down at the shipyard and asked my men to call me
out for a talk.”

Gillies? At the human end of the island? That hadn’t
happened in decades. Gillies never went farther south
than the promontory where they had built their power
plant. Never.

Delagard gave him a tortured look. “ ‘What do you
want?’ I said. Using the politest gestures, Lawler, every-
thing very very courteous. I think the ones that were
there were the big Gillie honchos, but how can you be
sure? Who can tell one of them from the next? They
looked important, anyway. They said, ‘Are you Nid Del-
agard?’ as if they didn’t know. And I said I was, and
then they grabbed me.”

“Grabbed you?”

“I mean, physically grabbed me. Put their little funny
flippers on me. Pushed me up against the wall of my
own building and restrained me.”

“You’re lucky you’re still around to talk about it.”

“No kidding. I tell you, doc, I was scared shitless. I
thought they were going to gut me and fillet me right
there. Look, look here, the marks of their claws on my
arm.” He showed fading reddish spots. “My face is
swollen, isn’t it? I tried to pull my head away and one of
them bumped me, maybe by accident, but look. Look.
Two of them held me and a third one put his nose in
my face and started telling me things, and I mean telling
me, big booming noises, ooom whang hoooof theeeezt,
ooom whang hooof theeezt. At the beginning I was so
shaken up I couldn’t understand any of it. But then it
came clear. They said it again and again until they made
sure I understood. An ultimatum, it was.” Delagard’s
voice dropped into a lower register. “We’ve been thrown
off the island. We have thirty days to clear ourselves out
of here. Every last one of us.”

Abruptly Lawler felt the ground disappearing beneath
his feet.

“What?”

The other man’s hard little brown eyes had taken on
a frantic glitter. He signaled for more brandy. Lawler
poured without even looking at the cup. “Any human
remaining on Sorve when the time’s up will be tossed
into the lagoon and not allowed back up on shore. Any
structures we’ve erected here will be demolished. The
reservoir, the shipyard, these buildings here in the plaza,
everything. Things we leave behind in the vaarghs go
into the sea. Any ocean-going vessels we leave in the
harbor will be sunk. We are terminated, doc. We are ex-

Robert Silverberg

residents of Sorve Island. Finished, done for, gone.”

Lawler stared, incredulous. A quick cycle of turbulent
emotions ran through him: disorientation, depression,
despair. Confusion assailed him. Leave Sorve? Leave
Sorve?

He began to tremble. With an effort he got himself un-
der control, fighting his way back to inner equilibrium.

Tightly he said, “Killing some divers in an industrial
accident is definitely not a good thing to have done. But
this is too much of an overreaction. You must have mis-
understood what they were saying.”

“Like shit I did. Not a chance. They made themselves
very clear.”

“We all have to go?”

“We all have to go, yes. Thirty days.”

Am I hearing him correctly? Lawler wondered. Is any
of this really happening?

“And did they give a reason?” he asked. “Was it the
divers?”

“Of course it was,” Delagard said in a low husky voice
clotted by shame. “It was just like you said this morning.
The Gillies always know everything that we do.”

“Christ. Christ.” Anger was beginning to take the place
of shock. Delagard had casually gambled with the lives
of everyone on the island, and he had lost. The Gillies
had warned him: Don ’t ever do that again, or we’ll throw
you out of here. And he had done it again anyway.

“What a contemptible bastard you are, Delagard!”

“I don’t know how they found out. I took precautions.
We brought them in by night, we kept them covered un-
til they were in the shed, the shed itself was locked — ”

“But they knew.”

“They knew,” Delagard said. “They know everything,
the Gillies. You screw somebody else’s wife, the Gillies
know about it. But they don’t care. Not about that. You
kill a couple of divers and they care like crazy.”

“What did they tell you, the last time you had an acci-
dent with divers? When they warned you not to use div-
ers again in your work, what did they say they’d do if
they caught you?”

Delagard was silent.

“What did they tell you?” Lawler said again, pressing
harder.

Delagard licked his lips. “That they’d make us leave
Sorve,” he muttered, once again looking down at his
feet like a schoolboy being reprimanded.

“And you did it anyway. You did it anyway.”

“Who would believe them? Jesus, Lawler, we’ve lived
here for a hundred fifty years! Did they mind when we
moved in? We dropped out of space and squatted right
down on their fucking islands and did they say, ‘Go
away, hideous repellent four-limbed hairy alien beings?’
No. No. They didn’t give a crap.”

“There was Shalikomo,” Lawler said.

“A long time ago, that was. Before either of us was
born.”

“The Gillies killed a lot of people on Shalikomo. In-
nocent people.”

“Different Gillies. Different situation.”

Delagard pressed his knuckles together and made a

little popping sound with them. His voice began to rise
in pitch and volume. He seemed very swiftly to be cast-
ing off the guilt and shame that had engulfed him. That
was a knack he had, Lawler thought, the rapid restora-
tion of his self-esteem. “Shalikomo’s an exception,” he
said. The Gillies had thought there were far too many
humans on Shalikomo, which was a very small island,
and had told some of them to go; but the humans of
Shalikomo had been unable to agree on who should go
and who could stay, and hardly anyone left the island,
and in the end the Gillies decided how many humans
they would allow to live there among themselves and
killed the rest. “It’s ancient history,” Delagard said.

“It was a long time ago, yes,” said Lawler. “But what
makes you think it can’t all happen again?”

Delagard said, “The Gillies have never been particu-
larly hostile anywhere else. They don’t like us, but they
don’t stop us from doing whatever we want to do, so
long as we stay down at our end of the island and don’t
get too numerous. We harvest kelp, we fish as much as
we like, we build buildings, we hunt for meatfish, we
do all sorts of things that aliens might be expected to re-
sent, and not a word out of them. So if I was able to
train a few divers to help me in oceanfloor metals re-
covery, which could only benefit the Gillies as well as
us, why do you suppose I would think that they’d be-
come so exercised over the death of a few animals in
the line of work that they — they would — ”

“The last straw, maybe,” Lawler said. “The one that
broke the camel’s back.”

“Huh? What the fuck are you saying?”

“Ancient Earth proverb. Never mind. What I’m saying
is that for whatever reason, the diver thing pushed them
over the edge and now they want us out of here.”

Lawler closed his eyes for a moment. He imagined
himself packing up his things, getting aboard a boat
bound for some other island. It wasn’t easy.

We are going to have to leave Sorve. We are going to
have to leave Sorve. We are going to —

He realized that Delagard was talking.

“It was a stunner, let me tell you. I never expected it.
Standing there up against the wall with two big Gillies
holding my arms and another one smack up in front of
my nose saying, You all have to clear out in thirty days,
you will vanish from this island or else. How do you
think I felt about that, doc? Especially knowing I was the
one responsible for it. You said this morning I didn’t
have any conscience, but you don’t know a damned
thing about me. You think I’m a boor and a lout and a
criminal, but what do you know, anyway? You hide
away in here by yourself and drink yourself silly and sit
there judging other people who have more energy and
ambition in one finger than you have in your entire — ”

“Knock it off, Delagard.”

“You said I had no conscience.”

“Do you?”

“Let me tell you, Lawler, I feel like shit, bringing this
thing down on us. I was born here too, you know. You
don’t have to give me any snot-nose condescending
First Family stuff, not me. My family’s been here from

The Face of the Waters

the beginning just like yours. We practically built this is-
land, we Delagards. And now to hear that I’m being
tossed out like a bunch of rotten meat, and that every-
one else has to go too — ” The tone of Delagard’s voice
changed yet again. The anger melted; he spoke more
softly, earnestly, sounding almost humble. “I want you
to know that I’ll take full responsibility for what I’ve
done. What I’m going to do is — ”

“Hold it,” Lawler said, raising one hand to cut him
off. “You hear noise?”

“Noise? What noise? Where?”

Lawler inclined his head toward the door. Sudden
shouts, harsh cries, were coming from the long three-
sided plaza that separated the island’s two groups of
vaarghs.

Delagard said, nodding, “Yeah, now I hear it. An ac-
cident, maybe?”

But Lawler was already moving, out the door, head-
ing for the plaza at a quick loping trot.

There were three weatherbeaten buildings — shacks, re-
ally, shanties, bedraggled lean-tos — on the plaza, one on
each side of it. The biggest, along the upland side, was
the island school. On the nearer of the two downslope
sides was the little cafe that Lis Niklaus, Delagard’s
woman, ran. Beyond it was the community center.

A small knot of murmuring children stood outside the
school, with their two teachers. In front of the commu-
nity center, half a dozen of the older men and women
were drifting about in a random, sunstruck way, moving
in a ragged circle. Lis Niklaus had emerged from her
cafe and was staring open-mouthed at nothing in partic-
ular. On the far side were two of Delagard’s captains,
squat, blocky Gospo Struvin and lean, long-legged Bam-
ber Cadrell. They were at the head of the ramp that led
into the plaza from the waterfront, holding on to the
railing like men expecting an immediate tidal surge to
strike. Between them, bisecting the plaza with his mass,
the hulking fish-merchant Brondo Katzin stood like a
huge stupefied beast, gazing fixedly at his unbandaged
right hand as though it had just sprouted an eye.

There was no sign of any accident, any victim.

“What’s going on?” Lawler asked.

Lis Niklaus turned toward him in a curiously mono-
lithic way, swinging her entire body around. She was a
tall, fleshy, robust woman with a great tangle of yellow
hair and skin so deeply tanned that it looked almost
black. Delagard had been living with her for five or six
years, ever since the death of his wife, but he hadn’t mar-
ried her. Perhaps he was trying to protect his sons’ inher-
itance, people supposed. Delagard had four grown sons,
living on other islands, each of them on a different one.

She said hoarsely, sounding half strangled, “Bamber
and Gospo just came up from the shipyard — they say
the Gillies were here — that they said — they told us —
they told Nid — ”

Her voice trailed off in an incoherent sputter.

Shriveled little Mendy Tanamind, Nimber’s ancient
mother, said in a piping tone, “We have to leave! We
have to leave!” She giggled shrilly.

“Nothing funny about it,” Sandor Thalheim said. He
was just as ancient as Mendy. He shook his head vehe-
mently, making his dewlaps and wattles tremble.

“All because of a few animals,” Bamber Cadrell said.
“Because of three dead divers.”

So the news was out already. Too bad, Lawler thought.
Delagard’s men should have kept their mouths shut un-
til we figured out a way to handle this.

Someone sobbed. Mendy Tanamind giggled again.
Brondo Katzin broke from his stasis and began bitterly
to mutter, over and over, “The fucking stinking Gillies!
The fucking stinking Gillies!”

“What’s the trouble here?” Delagard asked, finally com-
ing stumping up along the path from Lawler’s vaargh.

“Your boys Bamber and Gospo took it upon them-
selves to carry the news,” Lawler said. “Everybody
knows.”

“What? What? The bastards! I’ll kill them!”

“It’s a little too late for that.”

Others were entering the plaza now. Lawler saw Gabe
Kinverson, Sundira Thane, Father Quillan, the Sweyners.
And more right behind them. They came crowding in,
forty, fifty, sixty people, practically everybody. Even five
or six of the Sisters were there, standing close together,
a tight little female phalanx. Safety in numbers. Dag
Tharp appeared. Marya and Gren Hain. Jose Yanez, Law-
ler’s seventeen-year-old apprentice, who was going to
be the island’s next doctor someday. Onyos Felk, the
mapkeeper. Natim Gharkid had come up from his algae
beds, his trousers soaked to the waist. The news must
have traveled through the whole community by this time.

Mostly their faces showed shock, astonishment, in-
credulity. Is it true? they were asking. Can it be?

Delagard cried out, “Listen, all of you, there’s nothing
to worry about! We’re going to get this thing smoothed
over!”

Gabe Kinverson came up to Delagard. He looked
twice as tall as the shipyard owner, a great slab of a man,
all jutting chin and massive shoulders and cold, glaring
sea-green eyes. There was always an aura of danger
about Kinverson, of potential violence.

“They threw us out?” Kinverson asked. “They really
said we had to leave?”

Delagard nodded.

“Thirty days is what we have, and then out. They
made that very clear. They don’t care where we go, but
we can’t stay here. I’m going to fix everything, though.
You can count on that.”

“Seems to me you’ve fixed everything already,” Kin-
verson said. Delagard moved back a step and glared at
Kinverson as if bracing for a fight. But the sea-hunter
seemed more perplexed than angry. “Thirty days and
then get out,” Kinverson said, half to himself. “If that
don’t beat everything.” He turned his back on Delagard
and walked away, scratching his head.

Perhaps Kinverson really didn’t care, Lawler thought.
He spent most of his time far out at sea anyway, by
himself, preying on the kinds of fish that didn’t choose
to come into the bay. Kinverson had never been active
in the life of the Sorve community; he floated through it

Robert Silverberg

the way the islands of Hydros drifted in the ocean, aloof,
independent, well defended, following some private
course.

But others were more agitated. Brondo Katzin’s deli-
cate-looking little golden-haired wife Eliyana was sob-
bing wildly. Father Quillan attempted to comfort her,
but he was obviously upset himself. The gnarled old
Sweyners were talking to each other in low, intense
tones. A few of the younger women were trying to ex-
plain things to their worried-looking children. Lis Niklaus
had brought a jug of grapeweed brandy out of her cafe
and it was passing rapidly from hand to hand among
the men, who were gulping from it in a somber, desper-
ate way.

Lawler said quietly to Delagard, “How exactly are you
going to deal with all this? You have some sort of plan?”

“I do,” Delagard said. Suddenly he was full of frenetic
energy. “I told you I’d take full responsibility, and I meant
it. I’ll go back to the Gillies on my knees, and if I have
to lick their hind flippers I will, and I’ll beg for forgive-
ness. They’ll come around, sooner or later. They won’t
actually hold us to this goddamned absurd ultimatum.”

“I admire your optimism.”

Delagard went on, “And if they won’t back off, I’ll
volunteer to go into exile myself. Don’t punish every-
one, I’ll tell them. Just me. I’m the guilty one. I’ll move
to Velmise or Salimil or any place you like, and you’ll
never see my ugly face on Sorve again, that’s a promise.
It’ll work, Lawler. They’re reasonable beings. They’ll un-
derstand that tossing an old lady like Mendy here off the
island that’s been her home for eighty years isn’t going
to serve any rational purpose. I’m the bastard. I’m the
murderous diver-killing villain, and I’ll go if I have to,
though I don’t even think it’ll come down to that.”

“You may be right. Maybe not.”

“I’ll crawl before them if I have to.”

“And you’ll bring one of your sons over to run the
shipyard if they make you leave here, won’t you?”

Delagard looked startled. “Well, what’s wrong with
that?”

“They might think you weren’t all that sincere about
agreeing to leave. They might think one Delagard was
the same as the next.”

“You say it might not be good enough for them, if
I’m the only one to go?”

“That’s exactly what I’m saying. They might want
something more than that from you.”

“Like what?”

“What if I told you they’d pardon the rest of us pro-
vided you left and agreed that you and your family
would never set foot on Sorve again, and that the entire
Delagard shipyard would be torn down?”

Delagard’s eyes grew very bright. “No,” he said.

“They wouldn’t ask that!”

“They already have. And more.”

“But if I go, if I really go — if my sons pledge never to
harm a diver again — ”

Lawler turned away from him.

For Lawler the first shock was past; the simple phrase
We are going to have to leave Sorve had incorporated it-

self in his mind, his soul, his bones. He was taking it
very calmly, all things considered. He wondered why.
Between one moment and the next, the existence on
this island that he had spent his entire life constructing
had been yanked from his grasp.

He remembered the time he had gone to Thibeire.
How deeply disquieting it had been to see all those un-
familiar faces, to be unaware of names and personal his-
tories, to walk down a path and not know what lay at
the end of it. He had been glad to come home, after just
a few hours.

And now he would have to go somewhere else and
stay there for the rest of his life; he would have to live
among strangers; he would lose all sense that he was a
Lawler of Sorve Island, and would become just anybody,
a newcomer, an off-islander, intruding in some new com-
munity where he had no place and no purpose. That
should have been a hard thing to swallow. And yet after
that first moment of terrifying instability and disorienta-
tion he had setded somehow into a kind of numbed ac-
ceptance, as though he were as indifferent to the evic-
tion as Gabe Kinverson seemed to be, or Gharkid, that
perversely free-floating man. Strange. Maybe it simply
hasn’t sunk in yet, Lawler told himself.

Sundira Thane came up to him. She was flushed and
there was a sheen of perspiration on her forehead. Her
whole posture was one of excitement and a kind of
fierce self-satisfaction.

“I told you they were annoyed with us, didn’t I? Didn’t
I? Looks like I was right.”

“So you were,” Lawler said.

She studied him for a moment. “We’re really going to
have to leave. I don’t have the slightest doubt of it.” Her
eyes flashed brilliantly. She seemed to be glorying in all
of this, almost intoxicated by it. Lawler remembered that
this was the sixth island she had lived on so far, at the
age of thirty-one. She didn’t mind moving around. She
might even enjoy it.

He nodded slowly. “Why are you so sure of that?”

“Because Dwellers don’t ever change their minds.
When they say something they stick to it. And killing div-
ers seems to be a more serious thing to them than killing
meatfish or bangers. The Dwellers don’t mind our going
out into the bay and hunting for food. They eat meatfish
themselves. But the divers are, well, different. The Dwell-
ers feel very protective toward them.”

“Yes,” Lawler said. “I guess they do.”

She stared straight into his eyes. She was nearly on
eye level with him. “You’ve lived here a long time,
haven’t you, Lawler?”

“All my life.”

“Oh. I’m sorry. This is going to be rough for you.”

“I’ll deal with it,” he said. “Every island can use an-
other doctor. Even a half-baked doctor like me.” He
laughed. “Listen, how’s that cough doing?”

“I haven’t coughed once since you gave me that
dope.”

“I didn’t think you would.”

Delagard suddenly was at Lawler’s elbow again. With-
out apologizing for breaking in on his conversation with

The Face of the Waters

Sundira, he said, “Will you come with me to the Gillies,
doc?”

“What for?”

“They know you. They respect you. You’re your fa-
ther's son and that gives you points with them. They
think of you as a serious and honorable man. If I have
to promise to leave the island, you can vouch for me,
that I mean it when I say I’ll go away and never come
back.”

“They’ll believe you without my help, if you tell them
that. They don’t expect any intelligent being to tell lies,
even you. But that still won’t change anything.”

“Come with me all the same, Lawler.”

“It’s a waste of time. What we need to be doing is
starting to plan the evacuation.”

“Let’s try it, at least. We can’t be sure if we don’t try.”

Lawler considered that. “Right now?”

“After dark,” Delagard said. “They don’t want to see
any of us now. They’re too busy celebrating the open-
ing of the new power plant. They got it going about two
hours ago, you know. They’ve got a cable running from
the waterfront to their end of the island and it’s carrying
juice.”

“Good for them.”

“I’ll meet you down by the seawall at sunset, all right?
And we’ll go and talk to them together. Will you do
that, Lawler?”

In the afternoon Lawler sat quietly in his vaargh, trying
to comprehend what it would mean to have to leave the
island, working at the concept, worrying at it. No pa-
tients came to see him. Delagard, true to his promise of
the early morning, had sent some flasks of grapeweed
brandy over, and Lawler drank a little, and then a little
more, without any particular effect. Lawler thought of al-
lowing himself another dose of his tranquilizer, but
somehow that seemed not to be a good idea. He was
tranquil enough as it was, right now: what he felt wasn’t
his usual restlessness, but rather a sodden dullness of
spirit, a heavy weight of depression, for which the pink
drops weren’t likely to be of any use.

I am going to leave Sorve Island, he thought.

I am going to live somewhere else, on an island I
don’t know, among people whose names and ancestries
and inner natures are absolute mysteries to me.

He told himself that it was all right, that in a few
months he’d feel just as much at home on Thibeire, or
Velmise, or Kaggeram, or whatever island it was that he
ultimately settled on, as he did on Sorve. He knew that
that wasn’t true, but that was what he told himself, all
the same.

Resignation seemed to help. Acceptance, even indif-
ference. The trouble was that he couldn’t stay on that
numbed-down level consistently. From time to time a
sudden flare of shock and bewilderment would hit him,
a sense of intolerable loss, even of out-and-out fear. And
then he had to start all over again.

When it began to grow dark Lawler left his vaargh
and headed down to the seawall.

Two moons had risen, and a faint sliver of Sunrise

had returned to the sky. The bay was alive with twilight
colors, long streaks of reflected gold and purple, fading
quickly into the gray of night as he watched. The dark
shapes of mysterious sea creatures moved purposefully
in the shallow waters. It was all very peaceful: the bay
at sundown, calm, lovely.

But then thoughts of the voyage that awaited him
crept into his mind. Lawler looked outward beyond the
harbor to the vastness of the unfriendly, inconceivable
sea. How far would they have to sail before they found
an island willing to take them in? A week’s journey? Two
weeks? A month? He had never been to sea at all, not
even for a day. That time he had gone over to Thibeire,
it had been a simple journey by coracle, just beyond the
shallows to the other island that had come up so close
by Sorve.

Lawler realized that he feared the sea. The sea was a
great world-sized mouth, which he sometimes imagined
must have swallowed up all of Hydros in some ancient
convulsion, leaving nothing but the little drifting islands
that the Gillies had created. It would swallow him too, if
he set out to cross it.

Angrily he told himself that this was foolishness, that
men like Gabe Kinverson went out into the sea every
day and survived it, that Nid Delagard had made a hun-
dred voyages between islands, that Sundira Thane had
come to Sorve from an island in the Azure Sea, which
was so far away that he had never heard of it. It would
be all right. He would board one of Delagard’s ships
and in a week or two it would bring him to the island
that would be his new home.

And yet — the blackness, the immensity, the surging
power of the terrible world-spanning sea —

“Lawler?” a voice called.

He looked around. For the second time this day Nid
Delagard stepped out of the shadows behind him.

“Come on,” the shipyard owner said. “It’s getting late.
Let’s go talk to the Gillies.”

There were electric lights glowing in the Gillie power
plant, just a little way farther along the curve of the
shore. Other lights, dozens of them, maybe hundreds,
could be seen blazing in the streets of Gillie-town be-
yond. The unexpected catastrophe of the expulsion had
completely overshadowed the other big event of the
day, the inauguration of turbine-driven electrical genera-
tion on Sorve Island.

The light coming from the power plant was cool,
greenish, faintly mocking. The Gillies had a technology
of sorts, which had reached an eighteenth or nineteenth
century Earth-equivalent level, and they had invented a
kind of light bulb, using filaments made from the fibers
of the exceedingly versatile sea-bamboo plant. The bulbs
were costly and difficult to make, and the big voltaic pile
that had been the island’s main source of power was
clumsy and recalcitrant, producing electricity only in a
sluggish, intermittent fashion and constantly breaking
down. But now — after how many years of work? Five?

Robert Silverberg

Ten? — the island’s bulbs were being lit from a new and
inexhaustible source, power from the sea, warm water
from the surface converted to steam, steam making the
generator’s turbines turn, electricity streaming forth from
the generator to light the lamps of Sorve Island.

The Gillies had agreed to let the humans at the other
end of the island draw off some of the new power in re-
turn for labor — Sweyner would make light bulbs for
them, Dann Menders would help with the stringing of
the cable, and so forth. Lawler had been instrumental in
setting up that arrangement, along with Delagard, Nicko
Thalheim, and one or two others. That was the one little
triumph of interspecies cooperation that the humans had
been able to manage in recent years. It had taken about
six months of slow and painstaking negotiation.

Delagard said, “We’ll go straight to the honcho cabin,
okay? No sense not starting at the top for this one.”

Lawler shrugged. “Whatever you say.”

They walked around the power plant and headed into
Gillie territory, still following the shore of the bay. The
island widened rapidly here, rising from low bayfront
levels behind the seawall to a broad circular plateau that
contained most of the Gillie settlement. On the far side
of the plateau there was a steep drop where the island’s
thick wooden sea-bulwark descended in a straight sheer
line to the dark ocean far below.

The Gillie village was arrayed in an irregular circle, the
most important buildings in the center, the others strung
raggedly along the periphery. The main difference be-
tween the inner buildings and the outer ones seemed to
be one of permanence: the inner ones, which appeared
to have ceremonial uses, were constructed of the same
wood-kelp timber that the island itself was built from,
and the outer ones, in which the Gillies lived, were slap-
dash tentlike things made out of moist green seaweed
wrapped loosely over sea-bamboo poles. They gave off
a ghastly odor of rot as the sun baked them, and when
they reached a certain degree of dryness the seaweed
coverings were stripped away and replaced with fresh
ones. What appeared to be a special caste of Gillies was
constantly at work tearing down the huts and building
new ones.

It would take about half a day to walk completely
across the Gillie end of the island. By the time Lawler and
Delagard had entered the inner circle of the village. Sun-
rise had set and the Hydros Cross was bright in the sky.

“Here they come,” Delagard said. “Let me do the talk-
ing, first. If they start getting snotty with me, you take
over. I don’t mind if you tell them what a shit you think
I am. Whatever works.”

“Do you really think anything’s going to work?”

“Shh. I don’t want to hear you talking like that.”

Half a dozen Gillies — males, Lawler guessed — were
approaching from the innermost part of the village. When
they were ten or twelve meters away they halted and ar-
ranged themselves in front of the two humans in a
straight line.

Delagard raised his hands in the gesture that meant,
“We come in peace.” It was the universal humans-to-
Gillies greeting. No conversation ever began without it.

The Gillies were now supposed to reply with the fu-
nereal wheezing sounds that meant, “We accept you as
peaceful and we await your words.” But they didn’t say
a thing. They simply stood there and stared.

“I don’t have a good feeling about this, do you?” Law-
ler said quietly.

“Wait. Wait.”

Delagard made the peace gesture again. He went on
to make the hand-signals that meant, “We are your
friends and regard you with the highest respect.”

One of the Gillies emitted what sounded like a fart.

Their glittering little yellow eyes, set close together at
the base of their small heads, studied the two humans in
what seemed like an icy and indifferent way.

“Let me try,” Lawler murmured.

He stepped forward. The wind was blowing from be-
hind the Gillies: it brought him their damp heavy musky
smell, mingled with the sharp reek of rotting seaweed
from their ramshackle huts.

He made the We-come-in-peace sign. That produced
no response, nor did the cognate We-are-your-friends
one. After an appropriate pause he proceeded to make
the signal that meant, “We seek an audience with the
powers that reign.”

From one of the Gillies came the farting sound again.
Lawler wondered if it was the same Gillie that had rum-
bled and snorted at him so menacingly in the early hours
of the day, down by the power plant.

Delagard offered I-ask-forgiveness-for-an-unintended-
transgression. Silence: cold indifferent eyes remotely
watching.

Lawler tried How-may-we-atone-for-departure-from-
right-conduct. He got nothing back.

“The lousy fuckers,” Delagard muttered. “I’d like to
put a spear right through their fat bellies.”

“They know that,” Lawler said. “That’s why they don’t
want to dicker with you.”

“I’ll go away. You talk to them by yourself.”

“If you think it’s worth trying.”

“You have a clean record with them. Remind them
who you are. Who your father was and what he did for
them.”

“Any other suggestions?” Lawler asked.

“Look, I’m just trying to be helpful. But go on, do it
any way you like. I’ll be at the shipyard. Stop off there
when you get back and let me know how it goes.”

Delagard slipped off into the darkness.

Lawler took a few steps closer to the six Gillies and be-
gan all over with the initiating gesture. Next he identi-
fied himself: Valben Lawler, doctor, son of Bernat Lawler
the doctor. The great healer whom they surely remem-
bered, the man who had freed their young ones from
the menace of fin-rot.

He felt the strong irony of it: this was the opening of
the speech he had spent half the night rehearsing in his
sleepless mind. He was getting a chance to deliver it af-
ter all. In the context of a very different situation, though.

They looked at him without responding.

At least they didn’t fart this time, Lawler thought.

The Face of the Waters

He signaled, “We are ordered to leave the island. Is
this so?”

From the Gillie on the left came the deep soughing
tone that meant an affirmative.

“That brings us great sorrow. Is there any way that
we can cause this order to be withdrawn?”

Negative, boomed the Gillie on the right.

Lawler stared at them hopelessly. The wind picked up,
flinging their heavy odor into his face by the bucketful,
and he fought back nausea. Gillies had never seemed
other than strange and mysterious to him, and a little re-
pellent. He knew that he should take them for granted,
simply one aspect of the world where he had always
lived, like the ocean or the sky. But for all of their famil-
iarity they remained, to him, creatures of another cre-
ation. Star-things. Aliens: us and them, humans and
aliens, no kinship. Why was that? he wondered. I’m as
much a native of this world as they are.

He held his ground and told them, “It was simply an
unfortunate accident that those divers died. There was
no malice involved.”

Boom. Wheeze. Hwsssh.

Meaning: We are not interested in why it happened,
only that it happened at all.

Behind the six Gillies, bleak greenish lights flashed
on and off, illuminating curious structures — Statues? Ma-
chines? Idols? — that occupied the open space at the cen-
ter of the village, strange lumps and knobs of metals
that had been patiently extracted from the tissues of
small sea creatures and assembled into random-looking,
rust-caked heaps of junk.

“Delagard promises never to use divers again,” Lawler
told the Gillies, cajoling them now, looking hopefully
for an opening.

Wheeze. Boom. Indifference.

“Won’t you tell us how we can make things good
again? We regret what happened. We regret it intensely.”

No response. Cold yellow eyes, staring, aloof.

This is idiocy, Lawler thought. It’s like arguing with
the wind.

“Damn it, this is our homeV’ he cried, matching the
words with furious equivalent gestures. “It always has
been!”

Three rumbling tones, descending in thirds.

“Find another home?” Lawler asked. “But we love this
place! I was bom here. We’ve never done harm to you
before, any of us. My father — you knew my father, he
was helpful to you when — ”

The farting sound again.

It meant exactly what it sounded like, Lawler thought.

There was no sense in going on. He understood fully
the futility of it. They were losing patience with him.
Soon would come the mmbling, the snorting, the anger.
And then anything might happen.

With a wave of a flipper one of the Gillies indicated
that the meeting was at its end. The dismissal was un-
mistakable.

Lawler made a gesture of disappointment. He signaled
sadness, anguish, dismay.

To which one of the Gillies replied, surprisingly, with

a quick rolling phrase that might almost have been one
of sympathy. Or was that only his optimistic imagina-
tion? Lawler couldn’t be sure. And then, to his amaze-
ment, the creature stepped out of the line and came
shuffling toward him with unexpected speed, its flipper-
arms extended. Lawler was too startled to move. What
was this? The Gillie loomed over him like a wall. Here it
comes, he thought, the onslaught, the casual lethal out-
burst of irritation. He stood as though rooted. Some fran-
tic impulse toward self-preservation shrieked within him,
but he couldn’t find the will to try to flee. The Gillie
caught him by the arm and pulled him close and enfold-
ed him with its flippers in a tight, smothering embrace.
Lawler felt the sharp curved claws lightly digging into
his flesh, gripping him with a strange, mystifying delica-
cy. He remembered the red marks Delagard had shown
him.

All right. Do whatever you want. I don’t give a damn.

Lawler had never been this close to a Gillie before.
His head was pressed against the Gillie’s huge chest. He
heard the Gillie heart beating in there, not the familiar
human lub-dub but more of a thum-thum-tbum, thum-
tbum-tbum. A baffling Gillie brain was only a few cen-
timeters from his cheek. Gillie reek flooded his lungs.

He felt dizzy and sick — but, weirdly, not at all fright-
ened. There was something so overpowering about hav-
ing been swept into this bizarre Gillie-hug that there
was no room in him for fear just now. The alien’s near-
ness stirred some kind of whirling in his mind. A sensa-
tion as powerful as a winter storm, as powerful as the
Wave itself, came raging up through the roots of his
soul. The taste of seaweed was in his mouth. The salt
sea was coursing through his veins.

The Gillie held him for a time, as if communicating
something — something — that couldn’t be expressed in
words. The embrace was neither friendly nor unfriendly.
It was beyond Lawler’s understanding entirely. The grip
of the strong arms was tight and rough, but apparently
not meant to injure him. Lawler felt like a small child be-
ing hugged by some ugly, strange, unloving foster moth-
er. Or like a doll clasped to the great beast’s bosom.

Then the Gillie released him, pushing him away with
a brusque little shove, and went shuffling back to rejoin
the others. Lawler stood frozen, trembling. He watched
as the Gillies, taking no further notice of him, swung
ponderously about, moved away, set out on their return
to their village. He stood looking after them for a long
while, understanding nothing. The rank smell of the
Gillie still clung to him. It seemed to him just then that
the odor would stay with him forever.

They must have been saying goodbye, he decided
finally.

That’s it, yes. A Gillie farewell, a tender parting hug.
Or not so tender, but a kiss-off, all the same. Does that
make sense? No, not really. But neither does anything
else. Let’s call it a gesture of farewell, Lawler thought.
And leave it at that.

Robert Silverberg

The final days before sailing were bad ones. Everyone
admitted the necessity to go, but not everybody had be-
lieved it would really happen, and now reality was clos-
ing in with terrible force. Lawler saw old women making
piles of their possessions outside their vaarghs, staring
blankly at them, rearranging them, carrying things inside
and bringing other things out. Some of the women and
a few of the men cried all the time, some of them quiet-
ly, some not so quietly. The sounds of hysterical sobbing
could be heard all through the night. Lawler treated the
worst cases with numbweed tincture. “Easy, there,” he
kept saying. “Easy, easy.” Thom Lyonides was drunk
three days straight, roaring and singing, and then he
started a fight with Bamber Cadrell, saying that nobody
was going to make him get on board one of those ships.
Delagard came by with Gospo Stmvin and said, “What
the fuck is this,” and Lyonides jumped at him, snarling
and screeching like a lunatic. Delagard hit him in the
face, and Struvin caught him around the throat and throt-
tled him until he calmed down. “Put him on his ship,”
Delagard said to Cadrell. “Make sure he stays there until
we sail.”

On the next-to-last day, and the last day also, parties
of Gillies came right down to the border between their
territory and the human settlement and stood there watch-
ing in their inscrutable way, as if making sure the hu-
mans were making ready to clear out. Everyone on
Sorve knew now that there would be no reprieve, no re-
vocation of the order of expulsion. The last doubters,
the last deniers, had had to cave in under the pressure
of those fishy, staring, implacable eyes. Sorve was lost
to them forever. That much was settled.

Just before the end, hours from deparmre, Lawler climbed

the island to its rearmost point, on the side opposite the
bay, where the high bulwark faced the ocean. It was
noon, and the water was ablaze with reflected light.

From his vantage point on the bulwark Lawler looked
out across the open sea and imagined himself sailing on
it, far from any shore. He wanted to find out if he still
feared it, that endless world of water on which he would
embark not very long from now.

No. No. All the fear seemed to have gone from him.
Lawler stared into the distance and saw nothing but
ocean, and that was all right. There wasn’t anything to
fear. He would be exchanging the island for a ship,
which was nothing more than a miniature island, really.
What was the worst-case possibility, then? That his ship
would sink in a storm, he supposed, or be smashed by
the Wave, and he’d die. All right: he had to die sooner
or later. That wasn’t news. But ships weren’t lost at sea
all that often.

What Lawler still felt, rather than fear of the voyage
that lay ahead, was the occasional sharp stab of grief for
all he would be leaving behind. The longing arose quick-
ly and just as quickly went, unsatisfied.

But now, strangely, the things he was leaving behind
began to leave him. As Lawler stood with his back to
the settlement, staring into the great dark expanse of the
water, they all seemed to depart on the breeze that was
blowing past him out to sea: his awesome father, his
gentle elusive mother, his almost forgotten brothers. His
whole childhood, his coming of age, his brief marriage,
his years as the island doctor, as the Dr. Lawler of his
generation. Everything going away, suddenly. Every-
thing. He felt weirdly light, as if he could simply mount
the breeze and float through the air to some other is-
land. All the shackles seemed to have broken. Every-
thing that held him here had fallen from him in a mo-
ment. Everything. Everything.

The Face of the Waters

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